SBIR-STTR Award

To meet the needs of advanced optical data systems, effective concepts for multiplexing signals are of great importance. This project approaches aspects of this need by designing and fabricating two novel types of demultiplexers. The first type employs a conventional concave aberration corrected diffraction grating operating in air to demux a signal into either an optical fiber array or a photodiode array output. The second type consists of a concave chirped grating applied to the end of a slab waveguide in order to produce a miniature solid material demultiplexer. Both systems are designed for simultaneous blazed grating efficiency from 1250 to 1350 nm in the first order, and 780 to 880 nm in the second order. The resulting demultiplexer system is capable of producing in excess of sixteen parallel data channels.