Silicon photonics non-resonant wavelength filters: comparison between AWGs, echelle gratings, and cascaded Mach-Zehnder filters

We present a comparison of different silicon photonics-based wavelength filters for different design criteria (e.g. channel spacing, number of channels, ...) and different performance metrics (e.g. insertion loss or crosstalk ). In this paper we compare only non-resonant filters, or finite-impulse response (FIR) filters, such as Arrayed Waveguide Gratings, Echelle Gratings and higher-order cascades of Mach-Zehnder filters. We derive the strengths and weaknesses from their operational principles and confirm those with experimental data from fabricated devices and extrapolated simulations.