Planar lightwave circuit based arrayed waveguide grating for radio frequency arbitrary waveform generation

Planar light wave circuits (PLCs) present many exciting opportunities in optical communications. PLCs are typically small, low loss optical devices which can be easily mass produced with today's semiconductor fabrication technology. PLCs are used as coupler/splitters for fiber-to-home connections as well as arrayed waveguide gratings for wavelength division multiplexing. This thesis explores a PLC-based arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) for use as a pulse shaping apparatus in a RF arbitrary waveform generation experiment. The PLC used was fabricated by NTT Electronics Inc. It consists of two arrayed waveguide gratings and an array of Mach-Zehnder switches and phase shifters. This device has 128 independently controlled channels with a spacing of 40GHz. Several RF arbitrary waveforms were produced using this PLC-based AWG. The waveforms demonstrate the ability of this technique to control the amplitude and frequency of the RF waveform on a cycle-by-cycle basis. The performance of the device is limited however due to manufacturing errors that result in unwanted spectral features in the unshaped optical spectrum. These unwanted features limit how accurately these waveforms can be produced.