Optical demultiplexer using a silicon concave diffraction grating

A demultiplexer composed of a concave diffraction grating and a multimode slab waveguide is attractive since it has many advantageous features. However, this type of demultiplexer has had high demultiplexing losses until now, because the concave diffraction gratings used had poor diffraction efficiency. A silicon concave diffraction grating has been developed to overcome this problem, manufactured by cylindrically bending a thin silicon plane diffraction grating. The diffraction efficiency of this grating was 82% at a blaze wavelength. The five-channel demultiplexer was assembled with this grating as well as with a multimode slab waveguide and a fiber array. Its branching loss was in the 1.4-1.8-dB range.