Metamaterial-Engineered Silicon Beam Splitter Fabricated with Deep UV Immersion Lithography.

Subwavelength grating (SWG) metamaterials have garnered a great interest for their singular capability to shape the material properties and the propagation of light, allowing the realization of devices with unprecedented performance. However, practical SWG implementations are limited by fabrication constraints, such as minimum feature size, that restrict the available design space or compromise compatibility with high-volume fabrication technologies. Indeed, most successful SWG realizations so far relied on electron-beam lithographic techniques, compromising the scalability of the approach. Here, we report the experimental demonstration of an SWG metamaterial engineered beam splitter fabricated with deep-ultraviolet immersion lithography in a 300-mm silicon-on-insulator technology. The metamaterial beam splitter exhibits high performance over a measured bandwidth exceeding 186 nm centered at 1550 nm. These results open a new route for the development of scalable silicon photonic circuits exploiting flexible metamaterial engineering.

Broadband Fourier-transform silicon nitride spectrometer with wide-area multiaperture input.

Integrated microspectrometers implemented in silicon photonic chips have gathered a great interest for diverse applications such as biological analysis, environmental monitoring, and remote sensing. These applications often demand high spectral resolution, broad operational bandwidth, and large optical throughput. Spatial heterodyne Fourier-transform (SHFT) spectrometers have been proposed to overcome the limited optical throughput of dispersive and speckle-based on-chip spectrometers. However, state-of-the-art SHFT spectrometers in near-infrared achieve large optical throughput only within a narrow operational bandwidth. Here we demonstrate for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a broadband silicon nitride SHFT spectrometer with the largest light collecting multiaperture input (320×410µm2) ever implemented in an SHFT on-chip spectrometer. The device was fabricated using 248 nm deep-ultraviolet lithography, exhibiting over 13 dB of optical throughput improvement compared to a single-aperture device. The measured resolution varies between 29 and 49 pm within the 1260-1600 nm wavelength range.

Silicon photonic on-chip spatial heterodyne Fourier transform spectrometer exploiting the Jacquinot's advantage.

Silicon photonics on-chip spectrometers are finding important applications in medical diagnostics, pollution monitoring, and astrophysics. Spatial heterodyne Fourier transform spectrometers (SHFTSs) provide a particularly interesting architecture with a powerful passive error correction capability and high spectral resolution. Despite having an intrinsically large optical throughput (étendue, also referred to as Jacquinot's advantage), state-of-the-art silicon SHFTSs have not exploited this advantage yet. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, an SHFTS implementing a wide-area light collection system simultaneously feeding an array of 16 interferometers, with an input aperture as large as 90µm×60µm formed by a two-way-fed grating coupler. We experimentally demonstrate 85 pm spectral resolution, 600 pm bandwidth, and 13 dB étendue increase, compared with a device with a conventional grating coupler input. The SHFTS was fabricated using 193 nm deep-UV optical lithography and integrates a large-size input aperture with an interferometer array and monolithic Ge photodetectors, in a 4.5mm2 footprint.