Ultra-compact low loss polarization insensitive silicon waveguide splitter

• Main Authors: Xiao, Zhe, Luo, Xianshu, Lim, Peng Huei, Prabhathan, Patinharekandy, Liow, Tsung-Yang, Zhang, Jing, Luan, Feng, Silalahi, Samson T. H.
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/98256; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/13309
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

We observe that the cascaded typical Y junctions will introduce unwanted periodic fringes over the spectrum in practical systems when they link with multimode waveguides. To solve the problem, we design and experimentally demonstrate a wavelength insensitive multimode interferometer (MMI) based 3-dB splitter which has all the merits of Y-splitters such as polarization insensitivity and ultra-compactness. The splitter has a footprint of 1.5 × 1.8 µm2, nearly one order smaller than the previously reported MMI splitters. The measured excess losses for TE and TM modes at telecom wavelength are as low as −0.11 dB and −0.18 dB respectively.