Silicon Nitride C-Band Grating Coupler with Reduced Waveguide Back-Reflection Using Adaptively Corrected Elliptical Grates

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ghannam, Ibrahim, Merget, Florian, Witzens, Jeremy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914842468679680
author Ghannam, Ibrahim
Merget, Florian
Witzens, Jeremy
author_facet Ghannam, Ibrahim
Merget, Florian
Witzens, Jeremy
contents We present experimental results for a fully etched C-band grating coupler with reduced back reflection fabricated in an 800 nm silicon nitride platform. Back-reflections are reduced by symmetrically interrupting the first few grates around the center axis of the propagating light. The span of the etched grates is gradually increased until they cover the full width. By interrupting the grates, light is reflected back obliquely, which leads to the excitation of higher-order modes that are scattered out of the structure. While this approach has been previously shown in silicon, it comes with a significant penalty in coupling efficiency of around 2.4 dB of extra loss in the layer stack investigated here. In this work, we present the design and measurement results of a grating coupler in which waveguide-to-waveguide back-reflections are suppressed by ~10 dB with this technique, while at the same time mitigating excess insertion losses by reshaping the grates as ellipses of varying eccentricity. This helps to compensate the phase front error induced by the interruption of the grates. This correction does not affect the level by which the back-reflection is suppressed, but reduces the insertion loss penalty from 2.4 dB to 1 dB.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_14413
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Silicon Nitride C-Band Grating Coupler with Reduced Waveguide Back-Reflection Using Adaptively Corrected Elliptical Grates
Ghannam, Ibrahim
Merget, Florian
Witzens, Jeremy
Optics
Applied Physics
We present experimental results for a fully etched C-band grating coupler with reduced back reflection fabricated in an 800 nm silicon nitride platform. Back-reflections are reduced by symmetrically interrupting the first few grates around the center axis of the propagating light. The span of the etched grates is gradually increased until they cover the full width. By interrupting the grates, light is reflected back obliquely, which leads to the excitation of higher-order modes that are scattered out of the structure. While this approach has been previously shown in silicon, it comes with a significant penalty in coupling efficiency of around 2.4 dB of extra loss in the layer stack investigated here. In this work, we present the design and measurement results of a grating coupler in which waveguide-to-waveguide back-reflections are suppressed by ~10 dB with this technique, while at the same time mitigating excess insertion losses by reshaping the grates as ellipses of varying eccentricity. This helps to compensate the phase front error induced by the interruption of the grates. This correction does not affect the level by which the back-reflection is suppressed, but reduces the insertion loss penalty from 2.4 dB to 1 dB.
title Silicon Nitride C-Band Grating Coupler with Reduced Waveguide Back-Reflection Using Adaptively Corrected Elliptical Grates
topic Optics
Applied Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14413