Colorless tunable optical dispersion compensator based on a silica arrayed-waveguide grating and a polymer thermooptic lens

We present a colorless tunable optical dispersion compensator (TODC) comprised of a silica arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) directly coupled to a polymer thermooptic lens. Using silica for the AWG allows it to be low loss and manufactured by a standard process, and using polymer for the thermooptic lens allows it to have a large tuning range and low electrical power consumption. This hybrid TODC is fully solid-state and scales to a large figure-of-merit (dispersion range times bandwidth squared). We demonstrate a version with 100-GHz free-spectral range and 1300-ps/nm tuning range with a 3-dB bandwidth >39 GHz and a lens power consumption <74 mW.