Significant crosstalk reduction using all-dielectric CMOS-compatible metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates experimentally that all-dielectric metamaterials on a silicon platform can significantly reduce crosstalk between waveguides, enabling denser photonic circuits with larger coupling lengths.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental validation of using all-dielectric metamaterials to reduce crosstalk in silicon photonics, achieving about a 10-fold increase in coupling length.

Findings

10-fold increase in coupling length between waveguides

Significant reduction in device size potential

Experimental validation on SOI platform

Abstract

A recent computational result suggests that highly confined modes can be realized by all-dielectric metamaterials (S. Jahani et. al., Optica 1, 96 (2014)). This substantially decreases crosstalk between dielectric waveguides, paving the way for high-density photonic circuits. Here, we experimentally demonstrate, on a standard silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform, that using a simple metamaterial between two silicon strip waveguides results in about a 10-fold increase in coupling length. The proposed structure may lead to significant reduction in the size of devices in silicon photonics.