Highly fabrication tolerant InP based polarization beam splitter based on p-i-n structure

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel InP-based polarization beam splitter that combines Pockels and plasma dispersion effects in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, achieving high fabrication tolerance and good performance over the C-band.

Contribution

A new polarization beam splitter design on InP platform that enhances fabrication tolerance using combined Pockels and plasma dispersion effects.

Findings

Extinction ratio better than 15 dB

On-chip loss of 3.5 dB

Operates over the full C-band

Abstract

In this work, a novel highly fabrication tolerant polarization beam splitter (PBS) is presented on an InP platform. To achieve the splitting, we combine the Pockels effect and the plasma dispersion effect in a symmetric 1x2 Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). One p-i-n phase shifter of the MZI is driven in forward bias to exploit the plasma dispersion effect and modify the phase of both the TE and TM mode. The other arm of the MZI is driven in reverse bias to exploit the Pockels effect which affects only the TE mode. By adjusting the voltages of the two phase shifters, a different interference condition can be set for the TE and the TM modes thereby splitting them at the output of the MZI. By adjusting the voltages, the very tight fabrication tolerances known for fully passive PBS are eased. The experimental results show that an extinction ratio better than 15 dB and an on-chip loss of 3.5 dB over the full C-band (1530-1565nm) are achieved.