Moth's eye-inspired perfectly vertical subwavelength grating coupler for silicon photonics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bio-inspired, anisotropic vertical grating coupler for silicon photonics that achieves high efficiency and unidirectionality with simple fabrication, suitable for integrated optical systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel, easy-to-manufacture grating design inspired by moth's eyes that enhances vertical light coupling in silicon photonics.

Findings

Achieved 41% in-coupling efficiency at 1550 nm in simulation.

Demonstrated unidirectionality of over 12 dB experimentally.

Confirmed the design's simplicity and effectiveness for integrated photonic applications.

Abstract

We propose a novel bio-inspired design principle for the perfectly vertical grating coupler. The main idea of our design is to introduce anisotropy to the grating stripe to direct the light to one side of the grating. This grating design is easy to manufacture, only requiring a single etching step, and it is designed to efficiently couple vertically incident light. This makes it a good candidate for heterogeneous integration of light sources, especially VCSELs, on chip for applications in classical and quantum communications, LIDARs, sensing systems, and others. The grating coupler was designed for the SOI material platform with a central wavelength of 1550 nm. We obtained the efficiency of in-coupling from the SMF-28 fiber of 41% at vertical incidence and unidirectionality of over 10 dB, with a bandwidth of 50 nm at a 1 dB level in simulation. Experimental measurements confirmed unidirectionality, with observed unidirectionality of 12.80+-0.02 dB and a single-coupler insertion loss of 8.35+-0.02 dB around 1528 nm.