High-efficiency Grating Coupler Research Articles

A High Efficiency Grating Coupler Based on Hybrid Si-Lithium Niobate on Insulator Platform

In this paper, a high efficiency grating coupler based on the Si thin film on Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3, LN) on insulator (LNOI) platform (Si-LNOI) was developed and analyzed. Two-dimensional finite-different time-domain (2D-FDTD) simulations were performed to optimize the grating structure. Those parameters (e.g., the layer thickness of SiO2, LNOI, and Si) and grating configuration were numerically investigated for the coupling efficiency. A coupling efficiency exceeding 98% at λ=1550 nm was obtained for TE polarization. Furthermore, the deviation tolerances of the grating period, the filling factor, the etching depth, and the layer thickness of the Si waveguide layer were studied systematically. The results indicated a high deviation tolerance. The grating coupler presented in this study could be achieved without adding fabrication steps other than etching, thereby showing high coupling efficiency and low fabrication complexity.

Ultra-Broadband Subwavelength Grating Coupler for Bound State in Continuum

Grating couplers (GCs) are important for light to couple between optical fibers and photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The Bound State in Continuum (BIC) waveguides offer new functionalities for PIC. High-Q resonators, electro-optical modulator, and photodetectors can be built on it without etching steps. Due to the special waveguide geometry of BIC waveguides, a high efficiency GC is still missing. In this work, we demonstrated a subwavelength grating (SWG) GC for BIC waveguide with a coupling efficiency of 8 dB and a 1 dB bandwidth >70 nm. The device shows ultra-broadband behavior which is extremely useful for BIC-based PICs.

HYPHa project: a low-cost alternative for integrated photonics

In this paper, a brief introduction to the Hybrid sensor platforms of integrated photonic systems based on ceramic and polymer materials (HYPHa) is presented. The project's goal is to establish a collaborative effort of institutes specialized in integrated optics. The newly formed group of professionals will be founded on research groups' experience, collaboration, and devotion. We intend to develop a method for combining competencies and a universal material platform for integrated photonics, based on newly validated hybrid materials as part of the project. Silica compounds with additions including TiO2, SnO2, used as structural matrices, polymer coatings with dopants (active or protective layers), organic dyes, and active two-dimensional materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides, graphene hybrids, and boron nitride will be the foundation for these materials. Full Text: PDF ReferencesK. Rola, A. Zajac, M. Czajkowski, A. Szpecht, M. Zdonczyk, M. Smiglak, J. Cybinska, K. Komorowska, "Ionic liquids for active photonics components fabrication", Opt. Mater. 89, 106-111 (2019). CrossRef D. Kowal, K. Rola, J. Cybinska, M. Skorenski, A. Zajac, A. Szpecht, M. Smiglak, S. Drobczynski, K. Ciesiolkiewicz, K. Komorowska, "Fluorescent ionic liquid micro reservoirs fabricated by dual-step E-beam patterning", Mater. Res. Bull. 142, 111434 (2021). CrossRef T. Martynkien, J. Olszewski, M. Szpulak, G. Golojuch, W. Urbanczyk, T. Nasilowski, F. Berghmans, and H. Thienpont, "Experimental investigations of bending loss oscillations in large mode area photonic crystal fibers", Opt. Express 15, 13547-13556 (2007). CrossRef E. Środa, J. Olszewski, and W. Urbańczyk, "Reducing bend-induced loss and crosstalk in a two-mode ridge waveguide by steplike thickness structuring", Appl. Opt. 61, 1164-1170 (2022). CrossRef P. Karasinski, C. Tyszkiewicz, A. Domanowska, A. Michalewicz, J. Mazur, "Low loss, long time stable sol–gel derived silica–titania waveguide films", Mater. Lett. 143, 5-7 (2015). CrossRef P. Karasinski, C. Tyszkiewicz, A. Maciaga, I.V. Kityk, E. Gondek, "Two-component waveguide SiO2:TiO2 films fabricated by sol–gel technology for optoelectronic applications", J. of Mater. Sci.: Mater. Electron. 26, 2733-2736 (2015). CrossRef M.A. Butt, A. Kazmierczak, C. Tyszkiewicz, P. Karasinski, R. Piramidowicz, "Mode Sensitivity Exploration of Silica–Titania Waveguide for Refractive Index Sensing Applications", Sensors 21, 7452 (2021). CrossRef A. Kazmierczak, M. Slowikowski, K. Pavlov, M. Filipiak, M. Vervaeke, C. Tyszkiewicz, H. Ottevaere, R. Piramidowicz, P. Karasinski, "Efficient, low-cost optical coupling mechanism for TiO2-SiO2 sol-gel derived slab waveguide surface grating coupler sensors", Opt. Appl. 50, 539 (2020). CrossRef M.A. Butt, S.N. Khonina, N.L. Kazanskiy, "A highly sensitive design of subwavelength grating double-slot waveguide microring resonator", Laser Phys. Lett. 17, 076201 (2020). CrossRef N.L. Kazanskiy, M.A. Butt, S.N. Khonina, "Silicon photonic devices realized on refractive index engineered subwavelength grating waveguides-A review", Opt. Laser Technol. 138, 106863 (2021). CrossRef M.A. Butt, S.N. Khonina, N.L. Kazanskiy, "Recent advances in photonic crystal optical devices: A review", Opt. Laser Technol. 142, 107265 (2021). CrossRef L. Xu, Y. Wang, E. El-Fiky, D. Mao, A. Kumar, Z. Xing, Md. G. Saber, M. Jacques, D.V. Plant, "Compact Broadband Polarization Beam Splitter Based on Multimode Interference Coupler With Internal Photonic Crystal for the SOI Platform", J. Light. Technol. 37, 1231 (2019). CrossRef R. Marchetti, C. Lacava, A. Khokhar, X. Chen, I. Cristiani, D.J. Richardson, G. T. Reed, P. Petropoulos, P. Minzioni, "High-efficiency grating-couplers: demonstration of a new design strategy", Sci. Rep. 7, 16670 (2017). CrossRef

High-efficiency grating coupler for an ultralow-loss Si3N4-based platform.

Integrated silicon nitride waveguides of 100 nm height can achieve ultralow propagation losses below 0.1 dB/cm at the 1550 nm wavelength band but lack the scattering strength to form efficient grating couplers. An enhanced grating coupler design based on an amorphous silicon layer on top of silicon nitride is proposed and demonstrated to improve the directionality of the coupler. The fabrication process is optimized for a self-alignment process between the amorphous silicon and silicon nitride layers without increasing waveguide losses. Experimental coupling losses of 5 dB and a 3 dB bandwidth of 75 nm are achieved with both regular and focusing designs.

High-Efficiency Grating Couplers for Pixel-Level Flat-Top Beam Generation

We demonstrate a kind of grating coupler that generates a high quality flat-top beam with a small beamwidth from photonic integrated circuits into free-space. The grating coupler is designed on a silicon-on-insulator wafer with a 220-nm-thick silicon layer and consists of a dual-etch grating (DG) and a distributed Bragg reflector (DBR). By adjusting the structural parameters of DG and DBR, a pixel-level (6.6 µm) flat-top beam with a vertical radiation of −0.5 dB and a mode match of 97% at 1550 nm is realized. Furthermore, a series of high-efficiency grating couplers are designed to create a flat-top beam with different scales.

High-efficiency grating coupler based on fast directional optimization and robust layout strategy in 130 nm CMOS process.

We experimentally demonstrated a high-efficiency grating coupler by combining an interleaved etch and apodized structure for fiber-to-chip coupling. The grating coupler was optimized using the fast directional optimization method to achieve apodization. The grating coupler utilized a layout strategy involving an extended mask to avoid alignment errors for a multi-etch structure. The coupling efficiency was measured to be -2.2 dB at a wavelength of 1549 nm with a 3 dB bandwidth of 47 nm. The grating coupler, having no gold reflector, subwavelength index matching structure, or additional material layers, was fabricated using a commercial silicon photonics process with a minimum feature size of 140 nm. This grating coupler design provides a robust and effective coupling scheme and the proposed method can be employed to adopt the design in accordance with standard foundry design rules.

Design of a high-efficiency grating coupler with flat-top-like output

What we believe to be a novel high-efficiency grating coupler that can couple out a flat-top-like beam profile is proposed. Theory analyses and simulation results are shown in the design with optimized parameters. The power-up from the optimized grating coupler is over 83.9% (−0.76dB) at the center wavelength of 1550 nm with the 3 dB bandwidth of about 140 nm. The flat-top area of the output light at a height of 1 µm above the waveguide surface is about 14×14µm2, which is applicable in the illumination field for many optical sensors.

Design of a novel high-efficiency grating coupler with flat-top like output

Design of a novel high-efficiency grating coupler with flat-top like output

Broadband High-Efficiency Grating Couplers for Perfectly Vertical Fiber-to-Chip Coupling Enhanced by Fabry-Perot-like Cavity.

We propose a broadband high-efficiency grating coupler for perfectly vertical fiber-to-chip coupling. The up-reflection is reduced, hence enhanced coupling efficiency is achieved with the help of a Fabry-Perot-like cavity composed of a silicon nitride reflector and the grating itself. With the theory of the Fabry-Perot cavity, the dimensional parameters of the coupler are investigated. With the optimized parameters, up-reflection in the C-band is reduced from 10.6% to 5%, resulting in an enhanced coupling efficiency of 80.3%, with a 1-dB bandwidth of 58 nm, which covers the entire C-band. The minimum feature size of the proposed structure is over 219 nm, which makes our design easy to fabricate through 248 nm deep-UV lithography, and lowers the fabrication cost. The proposed design has potential in efficient and fabrication-tolerant interfacing applications, between off-chip light sources and integrated chips that can be mass-produced.

Computational design of efficient grating couplers using artificial intelligence

We examined the applicability of neural networks (NNs) and the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) for designing high-efficiency grating couplers on a Si-on-insulator (SOI) photonics platform operating at a wavelength of 1550 nm. We trained a NN to predict the wavelength dependences of coupling efficiency instead of using the finite-difference time-domain method, which enabled us to calculate analytically the gradient of coupling efficiency with respect to the design parameters. As a result, we found that a gradient-based method can be applied to find a more optimal design from an apodized grating coupler. In contrast, the CMA-ES, which is one of the most efficient evolutionary strategies, enabled us to explore a large design-parameter space efficiently without any constraint in an initial design of a grating coupler. As a result, we successfully obtained the optimal design from a uniform grating coupler. The optimized grating coupler exhibited a coupling efficiency of 74.7% when the thickness of the Si layer is 220 nm. The CMA-ES also enabled us to optimize the thickness of the Si gratings simultaneously. Through the optimization, we achieved a coupling efficiency of 92.1% when the Si thickness is 293 nm.

Testing multi-photon interference on a silicon chip.

Multi-photon interference in large multi-port interferometers is key to linear optical quantum computing and in particular to boson sampling. Silicon photonics enables complex interferometric circuits with many components in a small footprint and has the potential to extend these experiments to larger numbers of interfering modes. However, loss has generally limited the implementation of multi-photon experiments in this platform. Here, we make use of high-efficiency grating couplers to combine bright and pure quantum light sources based on ppKTP waveguides with silicon circuits. We interfere up to 5 photons in up to 15 modes, verifying genuine multi-photon interference by comparing the results against various models including partial distinguishability between photons.

Efficient demultiplexed single-photon source with a quantum dot coupled to a nanophotonic waveguide

Planar nanostructures allow near-ideal extraction of emission from a quantum emitter embedded within, thereby realizing deterministic single-photon sources. Such a source can be transformed into M single-photon sources by implementing active temporal-to-spatial mode demultiplexing. We report on the realization of such a demultiplexed source based on a quantum dot embedded in a nanophotonic waveguide. Efficient outcoupling (>60%) from the waveguide into a single mode optical fiber is obtained with high-efficiency grating couplers. As a proof-of-concept, active demultiplexing into M = 4 spatial channels is demonstrated by the use of electro-optic modulators with an end-to-end efficiency of >81% into single-mode fibers. Overall, we demonstrate four-photon coincidence rates of >1 Hz even under nonresonant excitation of the quantum dot. The main limitation of the current source is the residual population of other exciton transitions, which corresponds to a finite preparation efficiency of the desired transition. We quantitatively extract a preparation efficiency of 15% using the second-order correlation function measurements. The experiment highlights the applicability of planar nanostructures as efficient multiphoton sources through temporal-to-spatial demultiplexing and lays out a clear path way of how to scale up toward demonstrating quantum advantages with the quantum dot sources.

High-efficiency grating-couplers: demonstration of a new design strategy

We present a simple and practical strategy that allows to design high-efficiency grating couplers. The technique is based on the simultaneous apodization of two structural parameters: the grating period and the fill-factor, along with the optimization of the grating coupler etching depth. Considering a 260 nm Si-thick Silicon-on-insulator platform, we numerically demonstrated a coupling efficiency of −0.8 dB (83%), well matching the experimental value of −0.9 dB (81%). Thanks to the optimized design, these results represent the best performance ever reported in the literature for SOI structures without the use of any back-reflector.

Compact high-efficiency perfectly-vertical grating coupler on silicon at O-band.

A compact, high-efficiency grating coupler is demonstrated for interfacing a silicon waveguide and a perfectly-vertical fiber at O-band. The grating lies on a tilted silicon membrane for minimizing the reflections. Circular grating lines are adopted to shorten the overall device length to about 60μm. 57% peak coupling efficiency and >28nm 1-dB coupling bandwidth are obtained experimentally. Back reflections of 1% to the silicon waveguide and the single mode fiber are theoretically estimated. The processing flow to realize the proposed structure is discussed in detail. The fabrication control over the tilted angle of the silicon membrane is investigated. The approach by applying an oxide cladding to improve the stability of the membrane is also introduced. The present grating coupler is compatible to common fabrication processes for silicon photonic chips.

A high-efficiency grating coupler between single-mode fiber and silicon-on-insulator waveguide**Project supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFB0402404), the High-Tech Research and Development Program of China (Nos. 2013AA031401, 2015AA016902, 2015AA016904), and the National Natural Foundation of China (Nos. 61674136, 61435002, 61176053, 61274069)

We present the design of a diffractive grating structure and get the optimal parameters which can achieve more than 75% coupling efficiency (CE) between single-mode fiber and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguide through 2D finite-different time-domain (FDTD) simulation. The proposed architecture has a uniform structure with no bottom reflection element or silicon overlay. The structure, including grating couplers, adiabatic tapers and interconnection waveguides can be fabricated on the SOI waveguide with only a single electron-beam lithography (ICP) step, which is CMOS-compatible. A relatively high coupling efficiency of 47.2% was obtained at a wavelength of 1562 nm.

High-Efficiency Grating Couplers Near 1310 nm Fabricated by 248-nm DUV Lithography

We demonstrate a highly efficient grating coupler with center wavelength near 1310 nm fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator (SoI) wafer by 248-nm deep ultraviolet lithography. One of the lowest reported losses of 2 dB is achieved using feature sizes of 200 nm and without other process enhancements, such as polysilicon. The higher efficiency is obtained through improved mode-matching based on a novel genetic algorithm, which utilizes two different etch depths. The 3-dB bandwidth is 50 nm, and the back-reflection to the waveguide is better than 20 dB. The result shows low-loss coupling between waveguides and single-mode fibers for 1310~nm applications suitable for mass production on the commonly used 220-nm SoI platform.

基于等效折射率人工剪裁的宽带高效光栅耦合器

基于等效折射率人工剪裁的宽带高效光栅耦合器

A High-Efficiency Nonuniform Grating Coupler Realized With 248-nm Optical Lithography

We describe a high-efficiency grating coupler (GC) fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator wafer with 220 nm top silicon layer. One single 60 nm shallow etch is required to define the diffractive gratings with a minimum lithographic feature size of 180 nm, which is within the limitation of 248 nm deep ultraviolet lithography. The measured average insertion loss is 3.1 ± 0.2 dB ~1550 nm with a 1 dB bandwidth of 41 ± 4 nm for TE polarization, whereas the best device exhibits 2.7 dB loss. The measured GC backreflection loss is better than 17 dB across the wafer. Cross-wafer data shows good uniformity and tolerance to fabrication variations. This is the best result reported for the commonly used 220 nm thickness Si that uses only a shallow etch step.

High Efficiency Grating Coupler for Coupling between Single-Mode Fiber and SOI Waveguides

A high efficiency grating coupler between single-mode fiber and silicon-on-insulator waveguide is designed by a formula method. Over 78.5% coupling efficiency (>−1.05 dB) with 3 dB bandwidth about 50 nm for one grating coupler is obtained experimentally and this result is the highest one as far as we know. This grating coupler is CMOS compatible which needs only one etch-step and is designed for a standard SOI chip without any Bragg reflector or bottom reflector.

High Efficiency and Broadband Two-Dimensional Blazed Grating Coupler With Fully Etched Triangular Holes

A 2-D blazed grating coupler with fully etched triangular holes to realize high efficient and broadband coupling between silicon-on-insulator nanowaveguide and fiber is proposed. By changing the lateral width of a triangular hole along propagating direction in each single grating period gradually according to effective medium theory, a high coupling efficiency of -2.78 dB and an extremely large 1 dB bandwidth of 180 nm are achieved simultaneously. By optimizing the buried oxide thickness from 2 to 1.83 μm, the coupling efficiency can be further improved to -2.18 dB and 1 dB bandwidth is enlarged to 290 nm.