Proceedings Article | 15 October 2015
KEYWORDS: Ultraviolet radiation, Waveguides, Silicon, Etching, Silica, Optical design, Signal processing, Optical communications, Finite-difference time-domain method, Photonic integrated circuits
The ultraviolet (UV) light wavelengths, typically defined to range from10-400nm, have proven to be useful for a number of applications, such as astronomy, biology, medicine and so on. It is important for us to study on the UV and related devices. In this paper, a novel and effective grating coupler for ultraviolet light was reported, which can couple efficiently ultraviolet light from fiber to waveguide at the wavelength of 300nm. The grating coupler was based on the oxide layer of silicon surface, because ultraviolet light can be transmitted pure silicon dioxide (SiO2) with low loss. Based on Bragg condition of grating, we use FDTD method to simulate and design the grating parameters operated under TM polarization. Using our optimization design parameters (period T, incident angle θ, filling factor f and etching height h) to optimize the mode matching between the fiber and the grating region, a relatively high coupling efficiency was obtained for the fiber and waveguide interface. In our design, filling factor f=0.55, period T=280nm etching height H=110nm, incident angle θ=11° can be realized in the process of manufacture. But coupling efficiency are sensitivity to the range of period of grating and incident angle θ, which increase the difficulty of processing and experiment, the process of technology and operation need high precision. Consequently, we the coupling efficiency can be largely increased and beyond 88.5% at center wavelength of 296nm and 1dB bandwidth, in which the theory analysis and the simulation results are in good agreement and coupling efficiency is the highest for this kind of coupler reported as we known. This kind submicron-sized SiO2 waveguides that can be fabricated by mature CMOS-compatible processes are showing promise for realistic dense photonic integrated circuit (PIC) in various applications including optical communications, optical interconnects, signal processing and sensing. The gratings open the path to pure silicon dioxide for ultraviolet the enabling new nonlinear optical functions as well as new spectroscopic lab on-a chip approaches.
