Arrayed Waveguide Gratings (AWG) and optical amplifer subsystems for their applications in advanced optical networks

During the last few decades, the Internet continues to grow exponentially with new services and applications emerging rapidly. The realization of broadband multimedia interactive services requires high-performance communication networks for both the access part and the transport part. It also requires development and deployment of new networking technologies. Optical Label Switching (OLS) technology is one of the most promising solutions for the optical packet switching transport network. It can provide the seamless integration for data networking and optical networking. It can also support both packet based traffic and circuit based traffic. The Optical Code Division Multiple Access (O-CDMA) technology is potentially well suited for providing very flexible and high-capacity access to the vast networking capacity available in all-optical local area networks or access network. O-CDMA networks configure or reconfigure such access by assigning or reassigning of codes.; For OLS application the dissertation discusses the role of AWGR in the switching fabric of OLS system. It also studies the gain-clamping EDFA (GC-EDFA) and its impact on a packet switching system. Then it demonstrates a cascaded multi-hop operation of OLS system with AWGR based switching fabric. By combining the switching fabric and GC-EDFA the dissertation demonstrates the transport and routing of IP traffic from IP client-to-IP client over a two-hop OLS core router with low packet-error-rates.; For O-CDMA application the dissertation successfully demonstrates the implementation of monolithically integrated InP encoder. The dissertation discusses the design issues of InP encoder, characterization of encoder, novel schemes for both channel phase error and array arm phase error calibration, and the implementation of InP encoder in an O-CDMA testbed. The dissertation discusses the advanced integrated photonics technologies towards realizing a monolithic on-chip InP O-CDMA system. Spectral encoding and O-CDMA testbed implementation using eight-chip Walsh code has been demonstrated for the first time using integrated encoder chips, with potential of rapid code reconfiguration and negligible power consumption. It is expected that the O-CDMA photonic chip development effort will demonstrate the feasibility of large scale, cost effective deployment of O-CDMA technology in local area networks.