Enablement of advanced silicon photonics optical passive library design leveraging silicon based RF passive development methodology

Silicon photonics technology emerged as a promising solution to address the technical challenges related to 100 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s optical link. Enabling the development of silicon photonics products requires the development of optical passive libraries integrated within conventional CAD tools used in the CMOS design flow. The optimization and modeling of silicon photonics optical passive is therefore a key point that can be addressed by leveraging methodologies that have been previously set up for optimizing RF passive in CMOS and BiCMOS technologies. In this paper, the relevance of such an approach is evaluated: the combination of FDTD electromagnetic simulations and a Design Of Experiments (DOE) prototyping have been used for optimizing scalable Grating Couplers (GCs) targeting Wavelength-Division Multiplexing applications (WDM). The obtained models for the GC have been successfully qualified experimentally.