High fabrication tolerance planar waveguide tunable optical attenuator

Abstract

The invention discloses a high-manufacturing-tolerance plane waveguide type variable optical attenuator which comprises a first coupler. The input end of the first coupler is connected with an input waveguide part. The two output ends of the first coupler are connected with the front end of an upper arm branch and the front end of a lower end branch respectively. The two input ends of a second coupler are connected with the back end of the upper arm branch and the back end of the lower end branch respectively. The output end of the second coupler is connected with an output waveguide part. Metal thin-film heaters are arranged on the upper arm branch and / or the lower arm branch and are placed between isolation grooves. The first coupler and the second coupler are asymmetric couplers, meanwhile, the coupling ratio of the second coupler is equal to the coupling ratio of the first coupler, according to the structure, when the refractive index of the upper arm branch or the lower arm branch changes, the attenuation of one output waveguide of the second coupler can meet the designing requirement that the attenuation is larger than 30 dB, through the structure, when fabrication errors reach + / - 0.1 micron, the attenuation can still be larger than 30 dB, and the manufacturing tolerance of a device is improved.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention relates to the technical field of integrated optics, in particular to a planar waveguide adjustable optical attenuator with high manufacturing tolerance. Background technique [0002] A tunable optical attenuator (VOA) is one of the most important optical passive components in an optical wavelength division multiplexing network system. It can realize power balance between channels in an optical wavelength division multiplexing network system. In the optical wavelength division multiplexing network system, from the viewpoint of suppressing nonlinearity and suppressing crosstalk, the level of each wavelength is required to be equal, especially with the application of DWDM transmission system and EDFA in optical communication, in the transmission of multiple optical signals Gain flattening and channel power equalization must be performed on the channel, dynamic saturation control must be performed at the optical receiver end, and other sign...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

[0007] The technical problem to be solved by the present invention is that because the existing adjustable optical attenuator is manufactured by the above process, there are process errors in the manufacturing process, so that the core layer and cladding parameters of the adjustable optical attenuator cannot completely match the design parameters during manufacture. , cannot achieve the desired modulation depth

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