An efficient technique for analyzing transmission characteristics of arrayed waveguide grating multiplexers C.-S. MA 1 , X.-Y. WANG 1* , H.-M. ZHANG 1 , D.-M. ZHANG 1 , Z.-C. CUI 2 AND S.-Y. LIU 1 1 State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Jilin University, 119 Jiefang Road, Changchun 130023, China; 2 College of Chemistry, Jilin University, 119 Jiefang Road, Changchun 130023, China (*author for correspondence: E-mail: wxyrcl@yahoo.com.cn) Received 19 February 2004; accepted 3 May 2004 Abstract. An efficient technique is presented for analyzing transmission characteristics of arrayed wave- guide grating (AWG) multiplexers. As an example, calculations using this technique are performed for a polymer 33 · 33 AWG multiplexer around the central wavelength of 1.55 lm with the wavelength spacing of 0.8 nm. Computed results show that this technique possesses high accuracy for analyzing the power profile, diffraction efficiency, transmission spectrum, free spectral range and crosstalk of the AWG mul- tiplexer. Key words: arrayed waveguide grating, crosstalk, free spectral range, multiplexer, power profile, trans- mission spectrum 1. Introduction An integrated-optic N · N wavelength multiplexer based on an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) is a key device in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical systems (Smit 1988; Takahashi et al. 1990, 1992a, b, 1993, 1994, 1995; Suzuki et al. 1994). AWG multiplexers can offer some basic functions including multiplexing, demultiplexing, add/drop multiplexing (Tachikawa et al. 1993) and N · N interconnection (Dragone 1989; Dragone et al. 1991, Zirngibl et al. 1992, 1993). Recently, polymer AWG multiplexers have attracted particular attention because of their excellent particular fea- tures compared with other material AWG devices, such as easier optical integrating, lower propagation loss, better thermal stability and temperature dependence, smaller birefringence, and easier control of the refractive index. Many research groups have fabricated such AWG devices using various polymeric materials (Hida et al. 1994; Hida and Imamura 1995; Diemeer 1996; Watanabe et al. 1997; Kobayashi et al. 1998). The diffractive distant field of an AWG plays an important role in the analysis of transmission characteristics. In number of previous papers, the envelope Optical and Quantum Electronics 36: 759–771, 2004. Ó 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 759