Subwavelength-grating contradirectional couplers for large stopband filters

Manipulating the coupling coefficient at subwavelength scales provides an additional degree of freedom in designing integrated Bragg gratings. We demonstrate asymmetric contradirectional couplers (contra-DCs) using sidewall-corrugated subwavelength grating (SWG) waveguides for broadband add-drop Bragg filters. We show that a SWG can effectively increase the overlap of coupled modes and thus the photonic band gap. The measured spectra show good agreement with the prediction of photonic band structure simulations. A record bandwidth of 4.07 THz (33.4 nm) has been achieved experimentally. A four-port Bragg resonating filter made of a phase-shifted Bragg grating SWG contra-DC is also demonstrated for narrow-band (near 100 GHz) filtering. All these devices are achieved on the 220-nm silicon-on-insulator platform with a compact length of less than 150 μm. These large stopband filters may find important applications such as band splitting, reconfigurable channel band switching, bandwidth-tunable filtering, and dispersion engineering.