Silicon nitride grating waveguide based directional coupler

Silicon nitride is a promising wave-guiding material for integrated photonics applications with a wide transparency bandwidth from visible to mid-infrared, with a superior performance in fiber-coupling and propagation losses, more tolerant fabrication process to the structure parameters variation and compatible with the CMOS technology. Directional coupler (DC) is very popular for realizing beam splitter because of its structural simplicity and no excess loss intrinsically. Here, a conventional silicon nitride directional coupler, three-dimensional vertical coupler, and grating waveguide assisted coupler are designed and fabricated, and compared with each other. A grating waveguide based coupler with a period of 300 nm and coupling length of 26 um, can realize a wideband 3-dB splitter for the wavelength in the range from 1540 to 1620 nm, for a transverse electric (TE) polarized wave. With further optimization of the grating period and duty cycle, the device performance can be further improved with a wider bandwidth.