Large Area Silicon Nanomembrane Photonic Devices on Unconventional Substrates

Abstract

Silicon photonics on unconventional substrates have demonstrated great promise in tremendous unprecedented applications. One challenge is transferring high quality and large scale crystalline silicon nanomembranes onto various substrates. We developed a low temperature nanomembrane transfer technique based on adhesive bonding and deep reactive ion etching. A large area (2 cm $\times\,$ 2 cm), 250 nm thick silicon nanomembrane is defect-freely transferred onto a glass slide. The average propagation loss of a single mode waveguide (500 nm wide) fabricated on the transferred silicon nanomembrane is ${\sim}{\rm 4.3}~{\rm dB}/{\rm cm}$ , which is comparable with those fabricated on silicon-on-insulator. To demonstrate the capability of accommodating large scale intricate photonic circuit, a 1 $\,\times\,$ 16 power splitter, consisting of photonic components with dimensions ranging from 119.4 $\mu{\rm m}$ to as small as 80 nm, is fabricated. An output uniformity of 0.96 dB at 1545.6 nm across all channels and an insertion loss of 0.56 dB are experimentally demonstrated.