Foundry-Processed Compact and Broadband Adiabatic Optical Power Splitters with Strong Fabrication Tolerance

Abstract

Optical power splitters play a crucial role as the fundamental building blocks for many integrated optical devices. They should have low losses, a broad bandwidth, and a high tolerance to fabrication errors. Adiabatic optical power splitters inherently possess these qualities while being compatible with foundry processes well suited for mass production. The long device lengths of adiabatic power splitters, however, are a limiting factor to achieve compact device sizes, which must be reduced. Here, we used a polynomial taper profile optimization algorithm to design 1 × 2 and 2 × 2 adiabatic power splitters with significantly shorter lengths than their adiabatic counterparts. The best-performing 1 × 2 and 2 × 2 power splitters had 20 μm and 16 μm coupling lengths, respectively. Our designs had minimum feature sizes ranging from 140 nm to 200 nm, and our measurements averaged across nine different chips showed excellent consistency in performance for devices with 180 nm and 200 nm minimum features. Both the 1 × 2 and 2 × 2 adiabatic optical power splitters had excess losses less than 0.7 dB over a 100 nm bandwidth, with a standard deviation lower than 0.3 dB. Furthermore, our measurements showed splitting ratios within 50 ± 3% over a 130 nm bandwidth. We also demonstrated the design of 1 × 2 power splitters with arbitrary splitting ratios, where splitting ratios ranging from 50:50 to 94:6 were achieved with standard deviations between 2% and 6%.