Silicon photonic paper-clip spiral delay lines with ultra-low delay loss of 0.5 dB/ns

TL;DR

This paper presents compact silicon photonic spiral delay lines with ultra-low delay loss of 0.5 dB/ns, achieved through innovative waveguide design, enabling efficient large-scale photonic integration.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel spiral waveguide design with significantly reduced delay loss, advancing silicon photonic delay line technology.

Findings

Propagation loss of 0.11 and 0.06 dB/cm at 1310 and 1550 nm

Group delay of 1163 ps for 9.5 cm waveguide

Delay loss of 0.5 dB/ns

Abstract

In this work, we demonstrate compact paper-clip spiral silicon photonic waveguides with ultra-low delay loss. We characterize the optical loss and group delay of single-mode and multi-mode silicon waveguides across the telecom O-, S-, C-, and L-bands. For spiral devices with 2.0-{\mu}m-wide waveguides, we measure propagation losses of 0.11 and 0.06 dB/cm at 1310 and 1550 nm, representing 10- and 20-times improvements, respectively, compared to the singlemode waveguides. Additionally, we observe a group delay of 1163 ps for a 9.5 cm-long waveguide with a compact device footprint of (0.30 {\times} 3.00) mm2, yielding a delay loss of 0.5 dB/ns. These results are highly promising for large-scale silicon photonic integration, delay lines, and on-chip programmable systems.