Alignment Tolerant Broadband Compact Taper for Low-Loss Coupling to a Silicon-on-Insulator Photonic Wire Waveguide

TL;DR

This paper presents a broadband, fabrication-tolerant, compact silicon waveguide taper that achieves high coupling efficiency over a wide wavelength range, with significant tolerance to fabrication variations and smaller footprint than traditional adiabatic tapers.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel broadband silicon waveguide taper design that is highly tolerant to fabrication variations and has a significantly smaller footprint than traditional adiabatic tapers.

Findings

Coupling efficiency >70% over 700 nm bandwidth

Tolerant to >100 nm fabrication variations with <5% transmission change

Footprint ~11.5 times smaller than adiabatic tapers

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate a broadband, fabrication tolerant, CMOS compatible compact silicon waveguide taper (34.2 um) in silicon-on-insulator wire waveguides. The taper works on multi-mode interference along the length of the taper. A single taper design has a broadband operation with coupling efficiency >70% over 700 nm that can be used in O, C and L-band. The compact taper is highly tolerant to fabrication variations; >100 nm change in the taper and end waveguide width varies the taper transmission by <5%. The footprint of the device i.e. taper along with the linear gratings is ~ 442 m2; i.e. 11.5X smaller than the adiabatic taper. The taper with linear gratings provides comparable coupling efficiency as standardly used focusing gratings. We have also compared the translational and rotational alignment tolerance of the focusing grating with the linear grating.