Compact optical 90 degrees hybrid employing a tapered 2x4 MMI coupler serially connected by a 2x2 MMI coupler.

We propose a novel optical 90 degrees hybrid employing a paired-interference-based tapered 2x4 multimode interference coupler and a 2x2 multimode interference coupler. It was experimentally shown that the proposed 90 degrees hybrid has very short device length of less than 227 mum and is never accompanied by any waveguide intersections for coupling to balanced photodiodes. The proposed device exhibited quadrature phase response with a common-mode rejection ratio of more than 20dB and a phase deviation of less than 5 degrees over C-band spectral range.