Monolithically Integrated Photonic Devices for Reconfigurable Metro-optical Network

The main focus of this dissertation is to explore the planar lightwave circuitry (PLC) based photonics integration that can be used as optical switching subsystem such as a reconfigurable optical add and drop multiplexer (ROADM) and wavelength selective switch (WSS). Performance evaluations of key optical parameters of ROADM and WSS are also accomplished for a reconfigurable metro mesh optical network. A PLC ROADM or WSS are made of wavelength multiplexer/de-multiplexer and a switching fabric, which are constructed by waveguide couplings, waveguide bends and waveguide crossings. In this dissertation, first, generalized optimization schemes for waveguide crossing and low-insertion loss AWG are proposed, which are applicable to different PLC (index difference) materials. Devices based on silica-on-silicon material (=0.78% and =1.5%) and Silicon Oxynitride materials (=17%) have been made and tested to compare with the theoretical simulation results. Next, monolithically integrated 2-degree ROADM and 8-Degree WSS devices are designed and fabricated. The first 2D-ROADM is to support 4 color-less add drop ports and 40 wavelengths, the 2nd 2D-ROADM is expandable to support 21 wavelengths. The network applications enabled by this expandable design is discussed. The WSS is to support 40 wavelength and 8 network MUX/DEMUX ports. An efficient scheme by multiple path interference (MPI) information in the output signals to pinpoint the defect region for a large scale integrated photonic devices proposed. The last part focuses on the performance evaluation of optical switching system in a reconfigurable metro optical network. A statistical methodology is proposed to evaluate the penalty of the receiver optical signal to noise ratio (R-OSNR). Real device statistical information is employed and the model is verified by the field measurement of OSNR penalty