Fabrication of Y-branch Planar Lightwave Circuit Optical Splitter

A Y-branch planar lightwave circuit(PLC) optical splitter was fabricated using semiconductor process,in this paper.The optical waveguide chip was packaged by coupling alignment and adhesion after fabrication.The insert loss of the 1 × 8 Y-branch planar lightwave circuit optical splitter was measured in the operation wavelength from 1 270 nm to 1 570 nm.The insert loss curve is almost flat,which indicates that the PLC splitters are insensitive to wavelength in the test range.However,the insert loss curve of fused biconical tapered optical splitter presents obvious windows restriction.Meanwhile,the polarization dependent loss and return loss of 8 output ports are less than 0.05 dB and larger than 50 dB in the wavelength of 1 310 nm and 1 550 nm,respectively.The results show that the PLC splitters have high transmission efficiency.