Single-etch grating coupler for micrometric silicon rib waveguides.

Grating couplers are widely used as an efficient and versatile fiber-chip coupling structure in nanometric silicon wire waveguides. The implementation of efficient grating couplers in micrometric silicon-on-insulator (SOI) rib waveguides is, however, challenging, since the coupler waveguide region is multimode. Here we experimentally demonstrate grating couplers in 1.5 µm-thick SOI rib waveguides with a coupling efficiency of -2.2 dB and a 3 dB bandwidth of 40 nm. An inverse taper is used to adiabatically transform the interconnection waveguide mode to the optimum grating coupler excitation field with negligible higher order Bloch mode excitation. Couplers are fabricated in the same etch step as the waveguides using i-line stepper lithography. The benefits of wafer-scale testing and device characterization without facet preparation are thus attained at no additional cost.

Characterization of integrated photonic devices with minimum phase technique.

Spurious reflections can preclude the accurate experimental characterization of integrated optical devices. This is particularly important for facet reflections in high refractive index platforms such as Indium Phosphide (InP) or Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) when no anti-reflective (AR) coating is used. In this paper we present a novel method to recover the original device characteristics from the measured power transmission in the presence of such reflections. Our approach uses minimum phase techniques to reconstruct time domain information which is filtered to remove the reflection artifacts. A criterion to assess if a certain device exhibits the minimum phase characteristics required to apply the technique is given. Simulated and experimental results for multi-mode interference couplers (MMICs) in SOI without AR coating validate the technique.

Dispersion and stability analysis for a finite difference beam propagation method.

Applying continuous and discrete transformation techniques, new analytical expressions to calculate dispersion and stability of a Runge- Kutta Finite Difference Beam Propagation Method (RK-FDBPM) are obtained. These expressions give immediate insight about the discretization errors introduced by the numerical method in the plane-wave spectrum domain. From these expressions a novel strategy to adequately set the mesh steps sizes of the RK-FDBPM is presented. Assessment of the method is performed by studying the propagation in several linear and nonlinear photonic devices for different spatial discretizations.

Effects of phase noise in an optical six-port measurement technique.

We study the effects of laser phase noise on a phase diversity coherent optical frequency domain (C-OFD) technique that has been recently proposed to measure passive devices used in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems. Theoretical expressions are provided to calculate the laser phase-noise to intensity-noise conversion in this technique under simplified circumstances. Obtained simulation results for a realistic measurement set-up show the validity of the approximate expressions. It is concluded that this effect is one of the limiting source of error for this measurement technique.