Polarization compensation in silicon-on-insulator arrayed waveguide grating devices

As the AWG size is reduced our experimental and theoretical work demonstrates that it becomes increasingly difficult to suppress higher order modes and birefringence using ridge dimension alone. In part, it simply becomes difficult to meet the required fabrication tolerances when the ridge dimension approaches the order of a micron. We show that a novel polarization compensator scheme similar to that previously reported for a grating based …