Low-loss demonstration and refined characterization of silicon arrayed waveguide gratings in the near-infrared.

A resonator is characterized with two cascaded arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs) in a ring formation. From this structure, the on-chip transmittance of a single AWG is extracted, independent of coupling efficiency. It provides improved measurement accuracy, which is essential for developing AWGs with extremely low loss. Previous methods normalize the off-chip AWG transmittance to that of a reference waveguide with identical coupling, leading to an uncertainty of ∼14 % on the extracted on-chip AWG transmittance. It is shown here that the proposed "AWG-ring" method reduces this value to ∼3 %. A low-loss silicon AWG and an AWG-ring are fabricated. Channel losses with <2 dB are found, with a crosstalk per channel approaching -30 dB. Such an efficient wavelength multiplexing device is beneficial for the integration of spectroscopic sensors, multi-spectral lasers, and further progress in optical communication systems.