Currently, grating couplers are widely used for the coupling from Single Mode Fiber SMF to Silicon Photonic waveguides. They have relatively good efficiency and they also allow surface testing of the components which is very important for the rapid testing and yield estimation of Si-Photonics circuits and their industrial wide spread. Recently, there has been an interest in Silicon waveguides with large cross section to reduce the maximum intensity in the guide and hence reduce the non-linear effects especially the two-photon absorption in Silicon ring resonators. Increasing the waveguide depth allows also lower diffraction for the output optical beam in chip-to-chip interconnection when using external mirror for beam routing and in optical sensing applications. When using the grating coupler with such deeply etched waveguides, higher order modes are usually generated in the guide and these modes are sometimes not desirable in the optical circuit to guarantee a specific optical performance. In this work, we present a design of an optical circuit for coupling power from Single Mode Fiber to the fundamental mode of a deeply etched Si waveguide with a depth of 500 nm at 1310 nm wavelength. The silicon guide is covered by silicon dioxide layer. The excitation is achieved through a grating structure designed for this purpose. The waveguide is multimode in the vertical direction and the higher order modes in this direction are filtered using a mode filter. The mode filter is based on the structure of a symmetric 3-waveguides directional coupler in which the 2 outer guides are designed to match the propagation constant of the higher order mode to be filtered. The proposed structure (grating and mode filter) achieves a coupling efficiency of about 37% for the fundamental mode of the deeply etched guide and a higher order mode rejection ratio greater than 28 dB. The structure performance is analyzed using the Finite Difference Time Domain FDTD technique.
Mode Division Multiplexing and De-multiplexing (MDMux / MDDeMux) has been considered a promising technique for increasing link capacity in optical interconnection. One of the most promising structures currently proposed for this application is the Asymmetric Directional Coupler ADC designed to match the propagation constant of the fundamental mode in one guide to that of the higher order modes of the adjacent guides in the coupler. Such an ADC has been used extensively in the literature to demonstrate the mode Mux for up to 16 modes in planar optical circuits. One of the key parameters in the design of such Mux / DeMux is the crosstalk (CT) due to the leakage of an undesired mode in a specific waveguide / channel. The evaluation of this parameter is usually done using numerical techniques such as the BPM or the FDTD. In this work, we apply the Coupled Mode Theory (CMT) on the ADC for the evaluation of the cross talk between guides. The results of the CMT are compared with those obtained by the 2D Beam Propagation Method, and a very good agreement is obtained. The CT is also calculated as a function of the wavelength and the location of the minimum is determined with accuracy better than 2.5 nm at the wavelength of 1550 nm. The developed CMT formulation allows very rapid structure optimization due to the great reduction in the design cycle.
Mode Division Multiplexing / De-Multiplexing (MD-MUX/De-MUX) is currently investigated as an effective and attractive technique for increasing channel capacity in optical communication networks. The core of such mode multiplexing is usually based on an optical mode converter. Different integrated optical structures have been proposed for mode conversion in planer technology. One of the difficulties in this direction is the design of a mode converter for higher order fiber modes where the energy is distributed in the two transverse dimensions of the guide cross section. In this work, we make use of the two dimensional multi-mode interferencein 2D multimode waveguide (2D MMI) for building a mode converter to convert a fundamental mode LP10 of single mode fiber to the third order LP21 mode in multimode fiber. The operating principle of the structure is based on using the 2D MMI with a proper length to create the 4 images on the SM input fiber into the output of the 2D symmetric MMI. The 4 images are distributed in the space in both the x and y directions as a 2x2 matrix form. For these images to form the field distribution of the fiber LP21 mode, a proper phase shift should be associated with each image. This is done using a section of phase shifters based on the control of the waveguide width that allows controlling its relative propagation constant. The proposed design is tested using the 2D Beam Propagation Method BPM. The obtained performance is quite encouraging.
A design for a compact Si photonic two mode demultiplexer for mode division multiplexing (MDM) applications is presented. The design uses the self-imaging in multimode interference structures to achieve MDM with an insertion loss less than 0.5 dB and a cross talk better than 20 dB over the C band. The imaging is achieved within a length that is half the length reported in the literature, and its overall dimensions are 42 μm×3 μm. The minimum cross talk is affected by the structure geometry. The tolerance of the design to variations in the dimensions is also studied.
We present the design of a parabolic multimode waveguide used as a spot size width converter. The designed structure allows reducing the input spot size width an order of magnitude using a very short structure with respect to linear or conventional tapers. An illustrative example of spot width reduction from 10 microns to a Si wire of 1 micron with a small length in the order of 17 microns and a coupling efficiency of ∼90% is presented. Using a linear taper structure with a taper length >100 μm, the coupled power is still less than that obtained by the parabolic multimode interference (PMMI) guide. This means that the PMMI offers a length reduction of more than 5× with respect to the linear taper to achieve the same spot reduction.
For small radius ring resonators, the estimation of the resonance wavelength and Free Spectral Range FSR using the group index fails to give accurate results consistent with the FDTD calculation. In this work we present a new formula for the calculation of these parameters. The formula is based on the expansion of the ring effective index as a function of the wavelength and then solving the resonance equation to get the resonant wavelength and the FSR. Using this form, the error in estimating the resonance wavelength is reduced from 5.7% to less than 0.3% when compared with the FDTD calculation.
In this work, we introduce the design of an integrated optical magic-T based on multimode interference phenomena. This new structure gives the sum and the difference of two input optical beams. The theoretical design has been verified using BPM simulation and good performances are obtained. The effects of geometrical variations as well as the overall performances have been investigated.
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