Polymer Waveguide-Based Crossing Waveguides and Adiabatic-Tapered Directional Couplers for Fiber Compatible Optical Interconnect

Abstract

Photonic integrated circuits have intrinsic merits of high integration, large bandwidth, and flexible design, which play an important role in optical communication systems for the interconnect. To increase the integration and routing of photonic circuits for manipulating the guide modes, we propose a simple and effective fiber compatible crossing waveguide to optimize the device layouts. To demonstrate the idea, we fabricated the device through optical lithography, and then optimized the processing parameters based on the analysis of image processing after fabrication, where the fabricated device shows an insertion loss lower than a maximum 1.0 dB with the crossing waveguides perpendicular to each other and operation wavelength from 1450 nm to 1630 nm for the operation of the E₂₁ and E₁₁ modes. The device offers the ability to manipulate guide modes without being affected by the waveguide crossing, which can provide a powerful way to form fiber compatible integrated photonic circuits.