Efficient polymer waveguide grating coupler with directionality enhancement

Abstract

Polymer is viewed as an ideal platform for integrated photonics sensing. We propose a polymer waveguide grating coupler with the enhancement of directionality. A gold film mirror beneath the grating coupler is introduced to prevent the power leakage into the substrate. A Bragg grating reflector in series with the coupler is adopted to reverse the forward diffraction light. The finite-difference time-domain method is used to theoretically investigate the dimensional parameters of grating coupler, gold film mirror, as well as the grating reflector. With both two methods, an enhanced coupling efficiency of 51.31 % can be obtained at the wavelength of 1550 nm. The 62-nm wide 1-dB bandwidth covers the C-band. The proposed design has potentials in integrated optical circuit and monolithic integrated sensors.