Spectral Division of the Optical Fiber Passband Using Narrowband Controllable Filter on the Base of Semiconductor Waveguide Microresonator

Abstract

We analyze the new principle of multichannel spectral division of optical fiber passband using controllable narrowband integrated optical filters composed of two-coupled ring microresonators made of different semiconductor materials. It is shown that appropriate selecting the semiconductor material and optimizing the design factors of selective optical element allows creating the simple and economical integrated optical filter with bandwidth 0.1 nm, frequency separation between adjacent optical carriers 0.2 nm and signal-to-noise ratio 50 dB. Utilizing such filters in optical fiber communication lines makes it possible to increase the number of transmitted in parallel optical carrier wavelengths up to 160 and even more, i.e., to provide the traffic transmission with the speed up to 1.6 Tbit/s in one direction and in single optical fiber