Large-aperture subwavelength grating couplers.

Abstract

Subwavelength nanostructure grating couplers fabricated on silicon-on-insulator substrates are used to simplify the fabrication process while maintaining high coupling efficiency. The main obstacle for their application in photonic integrated circuits is the small aperture size of the nanostructure when TE polarization is involved, since they are difficult to achieve with 193 nm deep-ultraviolet lithography and cause problems in inductively coupled plasma etching. A larger lateral period has been used to increase the aperture size. Here, we propose that decreasing the effective index of the nanostructure can also enlarge the aperture size. We analyze the two methods in detail with a rectangle-hole nanostructure and 220 nm thick waveguide layer, aiming at TE polarization centered at 1560 nm. We find performance degenerations for large lateral periods, and this can be simply compensated by adjusting the width of the rectangle hole. The minimum linewidth of the nanostructure can reach 240 nm, while the coupling efficiency is just slightly decreased. The backreflections of a large-aperture grating increase but stay in the same order with ordinary ones, and we also show that this can be overcome by apodizing the grating structure. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the designed large-aperture grating couplers and the coupling efficiencies are higher than 35%, and reach a rectangle-hole width.