C- and O-Band Dual-Polarization Fiber-to-Chip Grating Couplers for Silicon Nitride Photonics

Highly efficient coupling of light from an optical fiber to silicon nitride (SiN) photonic integrated circuits (PICs) is experimentally demonstrated with simple and fabrication-tolerant grating couplers (GC). Fully etched amorphous silicon gratings are formed on top of foundry-produced SiN PICs in a back-end-of-the-line (BEOL) process, which is compatible with 248 nm deep UV lithography. Metallic back reflectors are introduced to enhance the coupling efficiency (CE) from −1.11 to −0.44 dB in simulation and from −2.2 to −1.4 dB in experiments for the TE polarization in the C-band. Furthermore, these gratings can be optimized to couple both TE and TM polarizations with a CE below −3 dB and polarization-dependent losses under 1 dB over a wavelength range of 40 nm in the O-band. This elegant approach offers a simple solution for the realization of compact and, at the same time, highly efficient coupling schemes in SiN PICs.ISSN:2330-402

Plasmonic 100-GHz Electro-Optic Modulators for Cryogenic Applications

We demonstrate an energy-efficient, 100-GHz plasmonic modulator operating at 4 K for beyond 128 GBd data modulation with ultra-low driving voltage of 0.1 V. High-speed components at cryogenic temperature are essential building blocks for scalable next-generation quantum computing systems