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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter February 21, 2018

Broadband and scalable optical coupling for silicon photonics using polymer waveguides

  • Antonio La Porta , Jonas Weiss EMAIL logo , Roger Dangel , Daniel Jubin , Norbert Meier , Folkert Horst and Bert Jan Offrein

Abstract

We present optical coupling schemes for silicon integrated photonics circuits that account for the challenges in large-scale data processing systems such as those used for emerging big data workloads. Our waveguide based approach allows to optimally exploit the on-chip optical feature size, and chip- and package real-estate. It further scales well to high numbers of channels and is compatible with state-of-the-art flip-chip die packaging. We demonstrate silicon waveguide to polymer waveguide coupling losses below 1.5 dB for both the O- and C-bands with a polarisation dependent loss of <1 dB. Over 100 optical silicon waveguide to polymer waveguide interfaces were assembled within a single alignment step, resulting in a physical I/O channel density of up to 13 waveguides per millimetre along the chip-edge, with an average coupling loss of below 3.4 dB measured at 1310 nm.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge Dow Corning Corporation (Midland, MI, USA) for developing and providing the optical polymers. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 688172 (STREAMS) and no. 688572 (WIPE). It was also supported by the Swiss National Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract nos. 15.0339 and 15.0309. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Swiss Government.

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Received: 2017-10-4
Accepted: 2018-1-24
Published Online: 2018-2-21
Published in Print: 2018-4-25

©2018 THOSS Media & De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston

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