Apodized fully-etched surface grating coupler using subwavelength structure for standard silicon-on-insulator waveguide

Abstract

We design and demonstrate the fully-etched apodized grating couplers based on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform using subwavelength structure for both transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) modes operation. The subwavelength grating (SWG) is used to engineer the refractive index using second-order effective medium theory (EMT). The whole designing procedure is given in details, especially a feasible and programmable method is developed to precisely manipulate the coupling strength of each grating cycle. A perfect Gaussian output beam can be synthesized for the TE mode operation, achieving a field overlap up to 98.3% with the Gaussian fiber mode. The simulated peak coupling losses are −4.63 and −2.99 dB for the TE mode and the TM mode, respectively, which are comparable with conventional shallowly etched grating couplers, realizing a fabrication simplification without performance penalty. The measured peak coupling loss is −7.6 dB for the TE mode coupler with a 1 dB bandwidth of 45 nm, and −6.1 dB for the TM mode coupler with a 1 dB bandwidth of 34 nm.