Wavelength division multiplexers/demultiplexers for high- throughput optical links

Communication between computing systems is recognized as the main limitation to increasing the speed of all-electronic systems beyond levels currently achieved in existing supercomputers. Optical interconnects hold great promise in eliminating current communication bottlenecks because of properties that stem from optics inherent parallelism. Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology, by which multiple optical channels can be simultaneously transmitted at different wavelengths through a single optical transmission medium is a useful means of making full use of optics parallelism over a wide-wavelength region. In this talk, we review the working principles of wavelength division (de)multiplexers (WD(D)M) for optoelectronic interconnection in high-throughput optical links and address the optical design issues of WD(D)Ms. Several grating-based WD(D)M structures are analyzed. We report experimental data for several versions of WD(D)Ms which exhibit low insertion loss, high reliability, and low cost.