Light injection in SOI microwaveguides using high-efficiency grating couplers

Abstract

An experimental characterization of the grating couplers for sub-micrometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides is presented. The grating couplers have been designed, realized, and characterized for the +1 diffraction order at an operating wavelength of 1.31 µm for TE polarization. At the resonant angle, a coupling efficiency higher than 55% has been measured. The angular coupling range and the wavelength tolerance have been evaluated to 3 • and 20 nm, respectively. The grating coupler is followed by a taper, and about 50% of the input power at 1.31 µm is coupled into sub-micrometer rib and strip SOI waveguides. The ration between light power decoupled toward the cladding and light power decoupled toward the substrate is about three.

MEMS tunable silicon photonic grating coupler for post-assembly optimization of fiber-to-chip coupling

“…As opposed to edge coupling approaches, grating couplers allow both mode size matching and outof-plane light coupling anywhere on the chip surface (Fig. 1b) [5,6,7]. However, errors in fiber-tograting alignment incurred during assembly and through long-term drift of glued parts result in significant and variable optical losses, hampering the spread of this technology (Fig.…”

Silicon photodetectors based on internal photoemission effect: The challenge of detecting near infrared light

“…In the past two decades, there has been growing interest in photonic devices based on Si-compatible materials (Kimerling et al, 2004;Jalali & Fathpour, 2006) in the field both of the optical telecommunications and of the optical interconnects. In this contest, tremendous progresses in the technological processes based on the use silicon-on insulator (SOI) substrates have allowed to obtain reliable and effectiveness full complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible optical components such as, low loss waveguides, high-Q resonators, high speed modulators, couplers, and optically pumped lasers (Rowe et al, 2007 ;Vivien et al, 2006 ;Xu et al, 2007 ;Michael et al, 2007;Liu et al, 2007 ;Liu et al, 2006). All these devices have been developed to operate in the wavelength range from C optical band (1528-1561 nm) to L optical band (1561-1620 nm).…”

The Effects of Various Apodization Functions on the Filtering Characteristics of the Grating-Assisted SOI Strip Waveguides

“…Bragg gratings are used in many integrated optical components for a large variety of applications including optical signal processing, high-speed optical communications, sensing systems and networking [1][2][3][4]. Examples of prevalent grating-based components are add/drop filters for wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) communication systems, grating-assisted couplers, dispersion compensators, distributed-feedback and distributed-Bragg-reflector lasers [5][6][7][8].…”