Ozcan, C.; Aitchison, J.S.; Mojahedi, M. Foundry-Processed Compact and Broadband Adiabatic Optical Power Splitters with Strong Fabrication Tolerance. Photonics2023, 10, 1310.
Ozcan, C.; Aitchison, J.S.; Mojahedi, M. Foundry-Processed Compact and Broadband Adiabatic Optical Power Splitters with Strong Fabrication Tolerance. Photonics 2023, 10, 1310.
Ozcan, C.; Aitchison, J.S.; Mojahedi, M. Foundry-Processed Compact and Broadband Adiabatic Optical Power Splitters with Strong Fabrication Tolerance. Photonics2023, 10, 1310.
Ozcan, C.; Aitchison, J.S.; Mojahedi, M. Foundry-Processed Compact and Broadband Adiabatic Optical Power Splitters with Strong Fabrication Tolerance. Photonics 2023, 10, 1310.
Abstract
Optical power splitters play a crucial role as the fundamental building blocks for many integrated optical devices. They should have low losses, broad bandwidth, and a high tolerance to fabrication errors. Adiabatic optical power splitters inherently possess these qualities while being compatible with foundry processes well-suited for mass-production. The long device lengths of adiabatic power splitters, however, are a limiting factor to achieve compact device sizes, which must be reduced. Here, we use a polynomial taper profile optimization algorithm to design 1×2 and 2×2 adiabatic power splitters with significantly shorter lengths than their adiabatic counterparts. The best performing 1×2 and 2×2 power splitters have 20 μm and 16 μm coupling lengths, respectively. Our designs have minimum feature sizes ranging from 140 nm to 200 nm, and our measurements averaged across 9 different chips show excellent consistency in performance for devices with 180 nm and 200 nm minimum features. Both the 1×2 and 2×2 adiabatic optical power splitters have excess losses less than 0.7 dB over a 100 nm bandwidth, with a standard deviation lower than 0.3 dB. Furthermore, our measurements show greater than 20 dB extinction ratios over 130 nm bandwidth. We also demonstrate the design of 1×2 power splitters with arbitrary splitting ratios, where splitting ratios ranging from 50:50 to 94:6 were achieved with standard deviations between 2% and 6%.
Keywords
Power Splitters; optical power splitting; adiabatic tapers; taper profile optimization
Subject
Physical Sciences, Optics and Photonics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
