Compact and broadband design of an 850 nm 2 × 2 3-dB directional coupler with a shallowly etched SWG gap

Abstract

A compact and broadband 2 × 2 3 dB directional coupler (DC) is designed at the 850 nm wavelength region based on the silicon nitride platform. The proposed DC is equipped with a shallowly etched subwavelength gratings (SWG) gap so that the length of the coupling region is effectively reduced to 7.8 µm for equally splitting the fundamental TE polarization state. Such a DC coupling region is much more compact than that using empty and pure SWG gaps. Meanwhile, the DC working bandwidth is determined to be broader than 106 nm, and the insertion loss is always kept under an acceptable level of 0.6 dB over the entire wavelength region. Considering that the shallowly etched device requires two photoetching processes in manufacturing, we did a numerical analysis to characterize the fabrication tolerance under a minimum overlay accuracy of 20 nm in both x and y directions. Such overlay mismatch only increases the maximal imbalance from 0.55 to 0.6 dB at the center wavelength. In addition, we discussed the impact of the proposed DC in its potential application, i.e., optical coherence tomography. The results show that the proposed DC is able to support a high axial resolution of 3.77 µm, and the 20 nm overlay mismatch leads to neglected axial resolution degradation.