Compact Transverse Electric Silicon-on-Insulator Mode Converter for Mode-Division Multiplexer

Résumé

On-chip optical-interconnect technology emerges as an attractive approach due to its ultra-large bandwidth and ultra-low power consumption. Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wire waveguides, on the other hand, have been identified to potentially replace copper wires for intra-chip communication. To take advantage of the wide bandwidth of SOI waveguides, wavelengthdivision multiplexing (WDM) has been implemented. However, WDM have inherent drawbacks. Mode-division multiplexing (MDM) is a viable alternative to WDM in MIMO photonic circuits on SOI as it requires only one carrier wavelength to operate. In this vein, mode converters are key components in on-chip MDM systems. The goal of this paper is to introduce a transverse electric mode converter. The suggested device can convert fundamental transverse electric modes to first-order transverse electric ones and vice versa. It is based on small material perturbation which introduces gradual coupling between different modes. This device is very simple and highly compact; the size of which is 3 μm2. Mathematical expressions for both the insertion loss and crosstalk are derived and optimized for best performance. In addition, three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (3D-FDTD) simulations are performed in order to verify the mathematical model of the device. Our numerical results reveal that the proposed device has an insertion loss of 1.2 dB and a crosstalk of 10.1 dB. The device’s insertion loss can be decreased to 0.95 dB by adding tapers to its material perturbation.

Citer ce document

Accès au document

Ce document est hébergé sur son dépôt institutionnel d'origine.

Auteur(s)

Statistiques

Consultations : 1

Téléchargements : 0