Electrically and Arbitrarily Reconfigurable Arrayed Waveguide Grating on Thin Film Lithium Niobate

Abstract Arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) is one important photonic integrated device. Yet, its miniaturization on high‐index platforms brings challenges, such as phase errors arising from fabrication variations, which leads to degradations of AWG performances, e.g., higher insertion losses, increased crosstalk, and deviations in central wavelengths. In this paper, an arbitrarily reconfigurable AWG is demonstrated on the x‐cut thin film lithium niobate platform. The device features a Manhattan‐style waveguide layout with separately addressed electrodes on each arrayed waveguide, which enables rapid and efficient phase tuning of them via the electro‐optic effect of the lithium niobate material. A particle swarm optimization algorithm is adopted to compensate for fabrication‐induced phase errors. After optimization, the 200‐GHz channel‐spacing AWG exhibits an insertion loss of −3.6 dB for the central wavelength channel and a crosstalk of −15.2 dB. Furthermore, central wavelength tuning with an efficiency of 15 pm V −1 and 50 pm V −1 cm −1 , as well as filtering bandwidth tuning, is achieved. The present reconfigurable AWG device structure can be potentially used for applications of, e.g., wavelength (de)multiplexing, optical signal processing, and spectral sensing.