Low-Loss Silicon Waveguides and Grating Couplers Fabricated Using Anisotropic Wet Etching Technique

Kapil Debnath,Alyssa Prasmusinto,Harold M H Chong,Hideo Arimoto,Shinichi Saito,Graham T Reed,Muhammad K Husain,Rafidah Petra,Abdelrahman Al-Attili

doi:10.3389/fmats.2016.00010

Kapil Debnath, Alyssa Prasmusinto + Show 7 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmats.2016.00010

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Journal: Frontiers in materials	Publication Date: Feb 22, 2016
Citations: 6	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: University of Southampton

Abstract

We report low-loss silicon waveguides and efficient grating coupler to couple light into them. By using anisotropic wet etching technique, we reduced the side wall roughness down to 1.2nm. The waveguides were patterned along the [112] direction on a [110] SOI substrate. The waveguide boundaries are decided by the [111] planes which are normal to the [110] surface. Fabricated waveguides show minimum propagation loss of 0.85 dB/cm for TE polarization and 1.08dB/cm for TM polarization. The fabricated grating couplers show coupling efficiency of -4.16dB at 1570nm with 3dB bandwidth of 46nm.

Highlights

Silicon photonics technology is seen as a potential solution to replace metal interconnects for boardto-board and intra-chip optical interconnects (Miller, 2009)
We demonstrated waveguides with propagation loss of 0.85 dB for transverse electric (TE) polarization and 1.08 dB for transverse magnetic (TM) polarization at telecomm wavelength
Using this arrangement and etching process, we demonstrated waveguides with propagation loss of 0.85 dB for TE polarization and 1.08 dB for TM polarization at telecomm wavelength

Summary

Frontiers in Materials

Received: 15 December 2015 Accepted: 08 February 2016 Published: 22 February 2016. We report low-loss silicon waveguides and efficient grating coupler to couple light into them. By using anisotropic wet etching technique, we reduced the side wall roughness down to 1.2 nm. The waveguides were patterned along the [112] direction on a [110] silicon-on-insulator substrate. The waveguide boundaries are decided by the [111] planes, which are normal to the [110] surface. Fabricated waveguides show minimum propagation loss of 0.85 dB/cm for TE polarization and 1.08 dB/cm for TM polarization. The fabricated grating couplers show coupling efficiency of −4.16 dB at 1570 nm with 3 dB bandwidth of 46 nm

INTRODUCTION

FABRICATION BY ANISOTROPIC WET ETCHING

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS