A Pixelized Variable Optical Attenuator Using Liquid Crystal on Silicon Technology for Tunable Filters

We apply liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) in 0.8-$mUm standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology to demonstrate a low-cost, high-performance pixelized liquid crystal variable optical attenuator (VOA) with pulse width modulation. We then build a prototype tunable filter by using this VOA along with a grating in the Littrow configuration. With the application of 5-V pulse width modulation, the proposed VOA achieves a 5.6-dB insertion loss, a dynamic range of more than 20 dB, a 50-GHz channel spacing capability, and a polarization-dependent loss (PDL) of less than 0.6 dB at 15-dB attenuation. Our VOA is suitable for applications such as dynamic channel gain equalizers, channel-blocking filters, sub-components of re-configurable add-drop modules, and wavelength selectors.