Design for broadband high-efficiency grating couplers

In this Letter, we propose general optimization methods to design broadband high-efficiency grating couplers for planar waveguides. We attribute the coupling bandwidth to the mismatch of effective indices between the diffracted beam and the actual grating structure around the operation wavelength fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xiao, Zhe, Luan, Feng, Liow, Tsung-Yang, Zhang, Jing, Shum, Perry Ping
Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/99207
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/10945
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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Summary:In this Letter, we propose general optimization methods to design broadband high-efficiency grating couplers for planar waveguides. We attribute the coupling bandwidth to the mismatch of effective indices between the diffracted beam and the actual grating structure around the operation wavelength for fiber to waveguide excitation. The coupling bandwidth formula is deduced. A simple parameter-separate optimization procedure is proposed for general layered grating couplers for high coupling efficiency. Using our principle, we optimized a grating coupler for a horizontal slot waveguide operating at wavelength 1.55 μm for TM polarization. The grating coupler has 1 dB bandwidth of 60 nm and coupling efficiency of 65% with incident light from single-mode optical fiber (SMF) at 8°.