Power-Efficient Thermal Optical Tunable Grating Coupler Based on Silicon Photonic Platform

A tunable grating coupler capable of dynamically changing the central wavelength with low power consumption is demonstrated and fabricated using a standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process. The grating coupler is based on an efficient thermal tuning scheme employing free-standing sili...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE photonics technology letters 2019-04, Vol.31 (7), p.537-540
Main Authors: Gao, Shengqian, Lin, Huating, Zhou, Lidan, Liu, Lin, He, Mingbo, Xu, Jian, Chen, Lifeng, Luo, Yannong, Cai, Xinlun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air gaps
Couplers
Couplings
direct heating
grating coupler
Gratings
Heating systems
Optical waveguides
Photonics
Power consumption
Silicon
Silicon photonics
Silicon substrates
thermal isolation
thermo-optic
Tuning
Waveguides
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Summary:A tunable grating coupler capable of dynamically changing the central wavelength with low power consumption is demonstrated and fabricated using a standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process. The grating coupler is based on an efficient thermal tuning scheme employing free-standing silicon-on-insulator strip waveguides. The air gap provides thermal isolation between the heated grating structure and the underlying silicon substrate, which greatly enhance the heating efficiency. We achieve a thermal shift of 55 nm for the central wavelength with 19.5 mW and a record tuning efficiency of 2.82 nm/mW, which is more than one order of magnitude better than the previous demonstration. The measured rise time and fall time are 0.16 and 0.74 ms, respectively.
ISSN:1041-1135
1941-0174
DOI:10.1109/LPT.2019.2900847