Fabrication-constrained nanophotonic inverse design

TL;DR

This paper presents a fabrication-constrained inverse design algorithm for nanophotonic devices, enabling the creation of compact, fabricable components with experimentally demonstrated high performance on silicon photonics platforms.

Contribution

The authors introduce a general inverse design method that incorporates fabrication constraints, demonstrated through designing and experimentally validating a compact broadband power splitter.

Findings

Designed a silicon photonics power splitter with 0.642 dB insertion loss

Achieved a footprint of 3.8 x 2.5 micrometers within fabrication rules

Demonstrated broadband operation over 1400-1700 nm

Abstract

A major difficulty in applying computational design methods to nanophotonic devices is ensuring that the resulting designs are fabricable. Here, we describe a general inverse design algorithm for nanophotonic devices that directly incorporates fabrication constraints. To demonstrate the capabilities of our method, we designed a spatial-mode demultiplexer, wavelength demultiplexer, and directional coupler. We also designed and experimentally demonstrated a compact, broadband $1 \times 3$ power splitter on a silicon photonics platform. The splitter has a footprint of only $3.8 \times 2.5~\mathrm{\mu m}$, and is well within the design rules of a typical silicon photonics process, with a minimum radius of curvature of $100~\mathrm{nm}$. Averaged over the designed wavelength range of $1400 - 1700~\mathrm{nm}$, our splitter has a measured insertion loss of $0.642 \pm 0.057 ~\mathrm{dB}$ and power uniformity of $0.641 \pm 0.054~\mathrm{dB}$.