Efficient fiber coupler for vertical silicon slot waveguides.

A mode size converter for efficient fiber coupling to silicon slot waveguides was proposed and demonstrated. It consists of two inverted lateral tapers that extend from the two strips of the silicon slot waveguide, and an overlaid low index waveguide with expanded mode size. Parameters including taper length and taper tip width were optimized with computer simulations. Samples were fabricated with a combined electron beam and photolithography process on a silicon-on-insulator wafer. The measured coupling loss to a standard single mode optical fiber was reduced by 8 dB for TE mode and 5.2 dB for TM mode with the converter.

[1]  Amadeu Griol,et al.  Label-free optical biosensing with slot-waveguides. , 2008, Optics letters.

[2]  J. V. Galan,et al.  Silicon sandwiched slot waveguide grating couplers , 2009 .

[3]  Qianfan Xu,et al.  Guiding and confining light in void nanostructure. , 2004, Optics letters.

[4]  M. Lipson,et al.  Nanotaper for compact mode conversion. , 2003, Optics letters.

[5]  T. Tsuchizawa,et al.  Low loss mode size converter from 0.3 /spl mu/m square Si wire waveguides to singlemode fibres , 2002 .

[6]  A. Stohr,et al.  High-efficiency fiber-to-chip coupling using low-loss tapered single-mode fiber , 2000, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[7]  Antao Chen,et al.  Enhanced Evanescent Confinement in Multiple-Slot Waveguides and Its Application in Biochemical Sensing , 2009, IEEE Photonics Journal.

[8]  M. Lipson,et al.  Electrically driven silicon resonant light emitting device based on slot-waveguide. , 2005, Optics express.

[9]  R Lawson,et al.  Optical modulation and detection in slotted Silicon waveguides. , 2005, Optics express.

[10]  Dan Song,et al.  A Fully Integrated 4 $\times$ 10-Gb/s DWDM Optoelectronic Transceiver Implemented in a Standard 0.13 $\mu{\hbox {m}}$ CMOS SOI Technology , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[11]  Y. Vlasov,et al.  Ultra-low loss photonic integrated circuit with membrane-type photonic crystal waveguides. , 2003, Optics express.

[12]  Lech Wosinski,et al.  Ultracompact low-loss coupler between strip and slot waveguides. , 2009, Optics letters.

[13]  S. Honkanen,et al.  Silicon slot waveguides for nonlinear optics , 2009, OPTO.

[14]  L. D. Negro,et al.  Optical gain in silicon nanocrystals , 2000, Nature.

[15]  F. Diederich,et al.  All-optical high-speed signal processing with silicon–organic hybrid slot waveguides , 2009 .

[16]  Pablo Sanchis,et al.  High efficiency fiber coupling to silicon sandwiched slot waveguides , 2008 .

[17]  Jurgen Michel,et al.  Lossless strip-to-slot waveguide transformer. , 2007, Optics letters.