Silicon Hybrid (de)multiplexer Enabling Simultaneous Mode and Wavelength-division Multiplexing

On-chip simultaneous mode and wavelength division-multiplexing (MWDM) is proposed using a tapered directional coupler and multimode interference (MMI) waveguide. A simulation is performed on the two different MWDM architectures, in which, two waveguide eigenmodes and two wavelength channels (1310/1550nm) are multiplexed. One of the proposed devices is compact (6μm x 100μm) and exhibits insertion loss as low as 1.2dB with a cross-talk of (-18dB).