Silicon nitride O-band (de)multiplexers with low thermal sensitivity

In this paper, four-channel cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometer-based wavelength (de)multiplexers in the O-band are demonstrated experimentally by utilizing silicon nitride (SiN) optical waveguides. By reference to the commonly used 100 Gigabit Ethernet standards, two types of (de)multiplexer devices with different channel spacings are designed and fabricated. Both the devices exhibit low insertion loss and flat passbands. The lower thermo-optical coefficient provided by SiN brings benefits of reduction in thermal sensitivity. The fabricated (de)multiplexers show a temperature-dependent wavelength shift of about 18.5 pm/°C, which is reduced by 75% compared to the standard silicon-based devices.