Waveguide design and fabrication of trench for hybrid integrated optic devices

Abstract

The hybrid integration of passive and optoelectronic devices has been widely researched. One of the main applications of this technique is for the fiber to the home (FTTH) network. In bi-directional transceivers, integrated WDM filters have been used to separate or combine the optical signals. Thin film filter (TFF) embedded waveguide type is effective for an application requiring wide bandwidth and low loss. Although the insertion loss of TFF itself is quite low, significant loss occurs at the trench and it depends on the geometrical structure and fabrication errors of the trench waveguide. The conventional sawing method and deep reactive ion etching technique were used for trench fabrication. In the case of using DRIE process, fabrication error was reduced and position error of the trench was controlled within 1um. This method could also enhance the platform design flexibility. To reduce the coupling loss between input and reflection waveguides with high tolerance of filter position, a few mode waveguide and horn waveguide were proposed. The insertion losses of transmission and reflection were less than 0.5dB and 0.7dB respectively. The 1dB tolerance of filter position was improved to be nearly twice than that of the conventional waveguide.