HIGH EFFICIENCY EDGE COUPLER, NOVEL NONLINEAR OPTICAL POLYMERS WITH LARGE KERR-COEFFICIENT AND AUTOMATIC LAYOUT GENERATION IN SILICON PHOTONICS

The potential of on-chip photonics is limited by the difficulty in coupling light from optical fibers to on-chip waveguides. Specifically, 3rd-order nonlinear on-chip photonics usually requires high optical power. Hence the first major focus of this research is to design high-efficiency edge couplers. To achieve this goal, loss mechanisms of basic inverse taper couplers are analyzed and experimentally verified. Then a cantilever-encapsulated inverse taper is demonstrated to further lower coupling loss compared to basic inverse tapers. Nonetheless, both couplers are designed to couple with lensed fibers. Hence for flat fibers with larger mode-field-diameter (MFD), a novel sub-wavelength grating based edge coupler is proposed and experimentally demonstrated to have 1.9dB/facet loss. Eventually a silicon multi-section taper with intermediate SU-8 waveguide cladding is proposed for flat fibers with even larger MFD and experimentally verified. Based on the result several suggestions are proposed for further improvement.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Year

2016

Author dc:creator

• Niu, Ben

Contributors dc:contributor

• Minghao Qi
• Vladimir Shalaev
• Xianfan Xu
• Yi Xuan

Repository record dc:identifier

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/1372

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:docs.lib.purdue.edu:open_access_dissertations-2588