Novel broadband reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer employing custom fiber arrays and Opto-VLSI processors.

A reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) structure based on using a custom-made fiber array and an Opto-VLSI processor is proposed and demonstrated. The fiber array consists of N pairs of angled fibers corresponding to N channels, each of which can independently perform add, drop, and thru functions through a reconfigurable Opto-VLSI beam steerer. Experimental results show that the ROADM structure can attain an average add, drop/thru insertion loss of 5.5 dB and a uniformity of 0.3 dB over a wide bandwidth from 1524 nm to 1576 nm, and a drop/thru crosstalk level as small as -40 dB.