Koki Sugiyama, Takafumi Chiba, Ken Tanizawa, Keijiro Suzuki, Takayuki Kawashima, Shojiro Kawakami, Kazuhiro Ikeda, Hitoshi Kawashima, Hiroshi Takahashi, Hiroyuki Tsuda
IEICE ELECTRONICS EXPRESS, 14(10) 1-6, May, 2017 Peer-reviewed
We propose a compact polarization diversity circuit for a silicon waveguide device. It consists of silica waveguides and photonic crystal waveplates, and can convert input light with various polarization states into two output light signals with the same polarization. Setting these circuits at the front and rear of two silicon optical switches, the polarization dependence in the switch can be dramatically suppressed. We fabricated polarization diversity circuits for a 4x4 silicon optical switch and realized a polarization insensitive 4x4 optical switch. The polarization dependent loss was reduced to 1.1 dB and the polarization dependent crosstalk was less than - 17 dB.