Ultrasmall arrowhead arrayed-waveguide grating with V-shaped bend waveguides

The ultrasmall arrowhead arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) with integrated waveguide mirrors has been proposed. The v-shaped bend waveguides, using integrated waveguide elliptic mirrors, were applied to the arrayed waveguide to reduce the AWG size. The small footprint leads to a low-cost waveguide device and decreases the phase error resulting from refractive index fluctuations. The eight-channel 40-GHz-spacing arrowhead AWG was fabricated from silica, with a refractive index difference of 0.75%. The size of this arrowhead AWG was 1.3 × 11.6 mm, being 1/10 of the size of the conventional one. The insertion loss and the adjacent crosstalk were 8.31 and -28.3 dB, respectively.