Bridging the gap between optical fibers and silicon photonic integrated circuits

Wissem Sfar Zaoui,Joachim Burghartz,Wolfgang Vogel,Manfred Berroth,Jörg Butschke,Andreas Kunze,Florian Letzkus

doi:10.1364/oe.22.001277

Wissem Sfar Zaoui, Joachim Burghartz + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1364/oe.22.001277

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Abstract

We present a rigorous approach for designing a highly efficient coupling between single mode optical fibers and silicon nanophotonic waveguides based on diffractive gratings. The structures are fabricated on standard SOI wafers in a cost-effective CMOS process flow. The measured coupling efficiency reaches -1.08 dB and a record value of -0.62 dB in the 1550 nm telecommunication window using a uniform and a nonuniform grating, respectively, with a 1 dB-bandwidth larger than 40 nm.

Highlights

As the need for higher data rates is nowadays rising more and more, the demand for high bandwidth communication increases at all levels
We present a rigorous approach for designing a highly efficient coupling between single mode optical fibers and silicon nanophotonic waveguides based on diffractive gratings
The structures are fabricated on a SOI wafer with a 3 μm buried oxide (BOX) and a 250 nm Si-layer thickness using a standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology process [22]

Summary

Introduction

As the need for higher data rates is nowadays rising more and more, the demand for high bandwidth communication increases at all levels. This includes long, medium and short reach interconnects starting from data centers down to backplanes, chip-to-chip and on-chip communication links. The optical interconnection technology has been proved to be the best candidate to replace the electrical copper links at high data rates owing to the larger bandwidth, lower energy consumption and immunity to electromagnetic interference. Several groups are investigating some mixed approaches, for example based on the silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) [3] integration or the combination of silicon photonics with III/V semiconductors [4], and have shown an enhanced performance in terms of speed and power consumption. The field of silicon photonics has to continue to be developed since it represents an excellent low-cost host platform and is compatible to the existing electronic system architectures

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