Fabrication and performance-analysis of a planar silica-based cascaded symmetric Y-branch 1 × 8 optical power splitter

Abstract

Fabrication of a planar silica-based cascaded symmetric Y-branch 1 8 optical power splitter is described in this study. Post-fabrication, thorough analysis of device-performance is presented in terms of insertion loss, nonuniformity and polarization-dependent loss. The fabricated device is designed based on cascaded Y-branching waveguide, comprising of a linear taper and symmetric S-bend arc branching waveguides. The simulated values of the average insertion loss, non-uniformity and polarization-dependent loss at the wavelength of 1550 nm are found to be 9.37 dB, 0.35 dB and 0.04 dB respectively. However, the above parameters have been measured to be around 17.5 dB, 1.5 dB and 1.8 dB respectively, for the fabricated device at that wavelength. Measured parameters are compared with the simulated results over a wavelength region of C & L band range. Some preventive points to minimize the deviation of the measured values of the parameters from those of the simulated results are also discussed.

A simple silica-on-silicon technology-compatible design of 1×8 optical splitter based on field matching Y-branch with S-bend sine taper and arc waveguide

“…However, after characterization of the device, the post-fabrication characterization of the device shows a poor performance [8], when tested over the full C+L band wavelength region in the optical window. This is due to major limitations towards the achievement of a perfect Y-junction with almost zero-gap splitting zone in silica-on-silicon technology, during fabrication through some critical processes like photolithography, reactive ion etching and plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD).…”

“…Various research groups have designed, fabricated and demonstrated several techniques like Y-branch splitter [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], multimode interference based splitter [9], directly UVwritten optical splitter [10] and so on, for achieving a compact, low-loss and cost-effective optical splitter. Among 1 3 these, Y-branch optical splitter is much popular because of its design simplicity, where the basic unit of this 1×N optical splitter is the Y-branch 1×2 optical power splitter.…”

Experimental Study of the Packaging Failure for Optical Fiber Arrays

“…Assembling these devices presents unique requirements and challenges [1][2][3]. Assembling these devices requires aligning dozens, even hundreds of channels of planar optical waveguide, with a cross section of 4µm × 4µm to 8µm × 8µm, to SMFs with a core diameter of 8~9µm [4,5]. The most common method uses optical fiber array to attach optical fibers to multi-channel optical waveguide chips as shown in Fig.…”