Broadband Lateral Tapered Structures for Improved Bandwidth and Loss Characteristics for All-Optical Wavelength Converters Xuejin Yan, Joe Summers, Wei Wan,, Marcelo Davanco, Wenbin Zhao, Milan Masanovic, Vikrant Lal, and Daniel Blumenthal Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California at Santa Barbara

Summary of Work Objective: Develop building blocks to extend tuning range and decrease insertion loss of SOA XPM tunable wavelength converter to 30nm tuning range at 1.55m wavelength. Approach: Monolithically Integrate SOA wavelength converter with Mach-Zehnder structure with tunable laser using based-InP material. Major accomplishments: 1) Designed new type of broadband splitter/combiner for WC. 2) Active/passive structures have been designed for same structures. 2) Splitter loss was measured to be better than # over a wavelength range of #. 3) Active XGM was demonstrated using this design. 4) A TWC has been designed and basic DC functionality demonstrated. 5) Two low loss coupling techniques have been designed and fabricated: (i) a window design and (ii) a tapered mode converter

Future Work