Design of arrayed-waveguide grating routers for use as optical OFDM demultiplexers

All-optical OFDM uses optical techniques to multiplex together several modulated lightsources, to form a band of subcarriers that can be considered as one wavelength channel. The subcarriers have a frequency separation equal to their modulation rate. This means that they can be demultiplexed without any cross-talk between them, usually with a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), implemented optically or electronically. Previous work has proposed networks of optical couplers to implement the DFT. This work shows that the topology of an Arrayed Grating Waveguide Router (AWGR) can be used to perform the demultiplexing, and that the AWGR can be considered as a serial-to-parallel converter followed by a DFT. The simulations show that the electrical bandwidths of the transmitter and receiver are critical to orthogonal demultiplexing, and give insight into how crosstalk occurs in all-optical OFDM and coherent-WDM systems using waveforms and spectra along the system. Design specifications for the AWGR are developed, and show that non-uniformity will lead to crosstalk. The compensation of dispersion and the applications of these techniques to 'coherent WDM' systems using Non-Return to Zero modulation is discussed. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America