Characterization and reduction of spectral distortions in Silicon-on-Insulator integrated Bragg gratings

Abstract

A major issue in the fabrication of integrated Bragg grating filters in highly confined waveguides is the average effective index fluctuations caused by waveguide dimension variations. Lateral variations are caused by the sidewall roughness created during the etching process while vertical variations are coming from the wafer silicon layer thickness non-uniformity. Grating spectral distortions are known to result solely from the low spatial frequency components of these variations. As a result, in this work, we present an experimental method to quantify such relevant spatial components by stitching a hundred high-resolution scanning electron microscope images. Additionally, we propose two techniques to reduce, in the design, the phase noise impact on integrated Bragg gratings without relying on fabrication process improvements. More specifically, we show that the use of hybrid multimode/singlemode waveguides reduce by more than one order of magnitude the effect of sidewall roughness on integrated Bragg gratings while we show that the fabrication of ultra-compact gratings in spiral waveguides mitigate the impact of the silicon layer thickness variations.