A Multi-Functional Planar Lightwave Circuit for Optical Signal Processing Applications

Ultrafast optical signal processing is now a necessary tool in several domains of science and technology such as high-speed telecommunication, biomedicine, microscopy and radar systems. Optical arbitrary waveform generation is an optical signal processing function which has applications in optical telecommunication networks, sampling, and photonically-assisted RF waveform generation. Furthermore, performing optical signal processing in photonic integrated circuits is crucial for system integration and overcoming the speed limitations in electrical to optical conversion. In this thesis, we introduce a silica-based planar lightwave circuit which performs several optical signal processing functions.;We start by reviewing the material system used to fabricate the device. We justify the choice of the material for our application and explain the fabrication process and the experiments to characterize the device. Then we introduce the fundamental theory of our device which is based on pulse repetition rate multiplication (PRRM) and shaping. We review the theory of direct time-domain approach to perform the PRRM and shaping. Experiments to measure the impulse response of the device, perform PRRM and polarization dependence characterization is shown as well.;Three main applications of our device is presented next. First we use the PLC device with non-linear optics to generate multiple pulse trains at different wavelengths and different repetition rates. Second, we use the fundamental of the previous application to perform demultiplexing of optical time division multiplexed signals. Our approach is flexible in a sense that it can demultiplex any tributary channel of lower rate data, also it works for both amplitude and phase modulated data.;Finally, using the second generation of our PLC device, we photonically generate radio frequency waveforms. We are able to generate various pulse shapes which are generally hard to generate using electronics at frequencies up to 80 GHz. We believe our PLC device which has the capability of performing several optical signal processing functions in one chip, is a major contribution to the integrated optical signal processing domain.