• Universitat de València
• Universitat Politècnica de València
• Paul-Drude-Institut fuer Festkoerperelektronic

• José Capmany Francoy
• Pascual Muñoz Muñoz
• Paulo Ventura Santos

An Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) is an integrated photonic device used to demultiplex telecommunication signals. Commercially available AWGs are static, i.e. their response cannot be modified after manufacturing. There is currently much interest in achieving dynamic control of the response of an AWG in order to adapt it to the needs of telecommunication signals. Although some methods of AWG response tuning have been proposed, none of them have been successfully achieved due to technical difficulties. The main reason is related to the individual control of the various waveguides of the device. So there is a problem to obtain a dynamically tunable control of the response of an AWG.

Researchers from the Universitat de València, in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and the Paul Drude Institute in Germany, have developed a novel Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) device with dynamic and tunable response, and a tuning method for this device. The invention is based on the generation of a surface acoustic wave (SAW), which acts simultaneously on all waveguides constituting the AWG. This new invention overcomes the problem of the prior art by obtaining a dynamic and tunable control of the response of an AWG.

The technique can be applied:

• Development of end-user optical access networks and especially for mobile access base station connectivity (3G, LTE, etc.).
• Instrumentation for operation and exploitation, optical spectroscopes.

The main advantages provided by the invention are:

• Dynamic and tunable control of the response of an AWG.
• Flexibility in the configuration and operation of WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) optical networks.
• Fast AWG response.
• Ease of AWG manufacture as only 4 electrical contacts are required to address all the AWG waveguides.

• Patent granted