Passive Optical Demultiplexing
An optical demultiplexer receives optical signal consisting of multiple wavelengths (frequencies) at the input, carried by an optical fiber. At the output its job is to separate each component wavelength and feed in to individual fibers.
An optical multiplexer, on the other hand, receives many wavelengths carried by many fibers as the input and combines (feeds) them onto a single fiber as output.
Common passive demultiplexers are based on thin-film filters, diffraction gratings, and AWGs. One can also design active demultiplexer by combining tunable detectors to these passive components.
Fig. 1. An optical demultiplexer.
Fig. 2. An optical multiplexer.
© 1999 Anis Rahman
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