Compact Waveguide Grating Couplers for Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) based on Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate were proposed to make miniaturized photonic devices on chip, so that low-cost and compact devices for applications including sensing, inter/intra-chip communications and optical fiber communications could be made. One of the key challenges in the development of highly integrated PICs is efficient coupling of light between a submicron-sized nanophotonic wire and an optical fiber due to the large loss inherent from the mismatch in mode field size between the optical fibers and the nanophotonic wire waveguides. An attractive approach for efficient coupling is to use diffractive grating couplers which show many advantages over alternative approaches. However the angled alignment of the optical fiber to the grating as reported in the previous work is not desirable for a low-cost optical packaging process.;We demonstrated a simple technique to realize vertical fiber coupling with linearly chirped grating periods. No additional fabrication process is required yet a comparable coupling efficiency is achieved with the proposed chirped grating couplers with vertical optical fibers. Design and experimental results of onedimensional (lD) gratings, two-dimensional (2D) gratings, focusing gratings and fully-etched nanoholes gratings are described in the thesis. We also describe the waveguides and grating couplers fabricated on silicon-on-sapphire for mid-infrared applications.;The 2D grating couplers could be used as polarization splitter. Polarization insensitive coupling and polarization-diversity circuits are realized by the 2D grating couplers. We also demonstrated a novel silicon waveguide grating which serves dual functions: as a 1x2 variable integrated beam splitter/combiner and as an out-of plane diffractive element for coupling light. The split ratio can be tuned by changing the launch position of the optical fiber without introducing much excess loss. An integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is implemented with this novel functional element. This MZI was demonstrated as a demodulator for differential phase-shift-keying (DPSK) signal.;An apodized grating coupler with the best coupling efficiency hitherto reported for shallow-etched waveguide grating couplers is described. By appropriate choice of waveguide/grating thicknesses and varying the coupling strength of the grating coupler via tailoring its fill factor to optimize the mode matching, a coupling loss of only 1.2dB was obtained for each fiber/silicon waveguide interface with a slightly titled optical fiber.