Inverse design engineering of all-silicon polarization beam splitters

Lars H. Frandsen; Ole Sigmund

doi:10.1117/12.2210848

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14 March 2016 Inverse design engineering of all-silicon polarization beam splitters

Lars H. Frandsen, Ole Sigmund

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Proceedings Volume 9756, Photonic and Phononic Properties of Engineered Nanostructures VI; 97560Y (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2210848
Event: SPIE OPTO, 2016, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Utilizing the inverse design engineering method of topology optimization, we have realized high-performing all-silicon ultra-compact polarization beam splitters. We show that the device footprint of the polarization beam splitter can be as compact as ~2 μm² while performing experimentally with a polarization splitting loss lower than ~0.82 dB and an extinction ratio larger than ~15 dB in the C-band. We investigate the device performance as a function of the device length and find a lower length above which the performance only increases incrementally. Imposing a minimum feature size constraint in the optimization is shown to affect the performance negatively and reveals the necessity for light to scatter on a sub-wavelength scale to obtain functionalities in compact photonic devices.

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Lars H. Frandsen and Ole Sigmund "Inverse design engineering of all-silicon polarization beam splitters", Proc. SPIE 9756, Photonic and Phononic Properties of Engineered Nanostructures VI, 97560Y (14 March 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2210848

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