Tunable optical delay line for optical time-division multiplexer

A novel three-stage all-pass filter (APF) is proposed as a tunable optical delay line to construct an optical time division multiplexer (OTDM), with which, we can get ultrahigh bit rates with several low-speed channels. The proposed design mitigates the deleterious effects of group delay dispersion and provides wide bandwidth with small ripples and continuously tunable long delays achieved with small variations in the effective refraction index, making it suitable for high-speed optical networks on chip.