Programmable Optical Filter Combining a FIR Structure and Intelligent Algorithms

To meet the evolving demands of optical communication and optical signal processing, we propose a programmable optical filter based on a finite impulse response (FIR) structure, consisting of twelve amplitude tuning modules and phase tuning modules. The genetic algorithm is introduced to simultaneously manipulate the twelve electrodes, hence the proposed optical filter could obtain efficiently reconfigurable ability. The experimental results demonstrate that under the guidance of the genetic algorithm, the bandpass shape of the FIR filter could be tuned to a variety of waveforms. The fitting errors between the experimental and simulated curves are less than 4.5%. Especially, the passband ripples could be as low as 0.24 dB.