Design, Fabrication And Characterization Of Planar Lightwave Circuits Based On Silicon Nanowire Platform

Optical devices based on Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC) technology have well been studied due to their inherited advantages from Integrated Circuits (IC), such as: small size, high reliability, mass production and potential integration with microelectronics. Among all the materials, silicon nanowire platform gains more and more interests. The large refractive index difference between core and cladding allows tremendous reduction of the component size. This thesis studies theoretically and experimentally some integrated optical devices based on silicon nanophotonic platform, including echelle grating demultiplexers and photonic crystals.Some of the numerical methods are introduced first. Scalar integral diffraction method is efficient for calculating the diffraction efficiency of gratings. Beam propagation method and finite-difference time-domain method are also introduced, for simulating the light propagation along the devices. A combined method based on BPM and FDTD method is introduced, which can save the memory and time for simulation to a large extent.The fabrication technology and characterization methods are described. The fabrication steps involve: plasma assisted film deposition, E-beam lithography, RIE-etching. All these steps are proceeded under cleanroom environment. The characterization is mainly based on two methods: end-fire coupling and vertical grating coupling. The grating coupler is more efficient compared with the butt-coupling between fiber and nanowires, but is worse solution for final packaging. Several types of components have been realized and characterized with the above technology. The echelle grating demultiplexer is one of the key components in WDM networks. A method for increasing the diffraction efficiency based on total internal reflection is applied, which increases the efficiency by more than 3dB. A cross-order echelle grating-based triplexer, a bidirectional transceiver for application in the Passive Optical Networks (PON), has been designed and fabricated, which can multi/demultiplex three channels located at 1310nm, 1490nm and 1550nm. Photonic crystal devices are also addressed in the thesis. A silicon pillar type photonic crystal cavity has been fabricated with the measured Q value as high as about 2.5×10~4. It can be used for some bio-sensing applications and has an extremely high sensitivity for the changing of the background material.