Silicon nanomembranes for high-performance flexible photonic interconnects and devices

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate the practicality of using silicon nanomembranes for use in high performance flexible photonic interconnects and devices. Using two silicon nanomembrane transfer schemes, we demonstrate successful transfer of several photonic building blocks including large aspect ratio (>4000) and long (>5cm) strip waveguides, band engineered slow light (n g > 30) photonic crystal waveguides, 1xN (1x2 and 1x6) multimode interference couplers etc, on a flexible Kapton polyimide substrate. A two-step cleaving method is also developed and implemented to facilitate testing of the transferred flexible photonic components for the first time. Upon cleaving, the propagation loss in transferred ultralong strip waveguide (~5.7cm) is found to be 1.1dB/cm, which is comparable to that of waveguides on SOI.