Abstract

Fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have recently seen application as a new class of extremely versatile devices to address a wide variety of challenges of present and future wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) systems. As the number of WDM channels expands to cover ultra-wide bandwidths, such high channel-count FBG devices become increasingly difficult to manufacture. One approach to such multi-channel FBG applications, first proposed for use in semiconductor laser Bragg reflectors,¹ is to impose a periodic amplitude superstructure on (‘sampling’) the FBG so as to generate a number of equally spaced reflective channels.² In the initial demonstrations, a uniform or chirped underlying grating was used, and the periodic sampling function was simply an on/off amplitude variation with a small duty cycle.

© 2002 Optical Society of America