A concise design of 16 × 16 polymer AWG with low insertion loss and crosstalk

In this paper, a 16-channel arrayed waveguide grating multiplexer (AWG) has been designed using polymer materials with 1.5% refractive index difference. Certain important parameters are optimized using the coupling mode theory and Beam Propagation Method. The factors that affect the insertion loss and the crosstalk are analyzed in this paper. In our design we introduced the parabolic taper structure and evaluated the suitable number of the arrayed waveguide, obtaining a total insertion loss of 2.19 dB. For obtaining a low crosstalk we evaluate the pitches of adjacent input/output waveguides ΔX and arrayed waveguides d as different values. We chose the value of ΔX about 2.5 times of d by enlarging the pitches of adjacent input/output waveguides. The crosstalk of the designed AWG is lower than −40 dB.