A Photonic 1 × 4 Power Splitter Based on Multimode Interference in Silicon-Gallium-Nitride Slot Waveguide Structures

Dror Malka; Yossef Danan; Yehonatan Ramon; Zeev Zalevsky

doi:10.3390/ma9070516

A Photonic 1 × 4 Power Splitter Based on Multimode Interference in Silicon-Gallium-Nitride Slot Waveguide Structures

Materials (Basel). 2016 Jun 25;9(7):516. doi: 10.3390/ma9070516.

Authors

Dror Malka^{1

2}, Yossef Danan³, Yehonatan Ramon⁴, Zeev Zalevsky⁵

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electro-Optics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel. drorm@hit.ac.il.
² Faculty of Engineering Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), Holon 5810201, Israel. drorm@hit.ac.il.
³ Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electro-Optics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel. yosidanan@gmail.com.
⁴ Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electro-Optics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel. yonathan.ram@gmail.com.
⁵ Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electro-Optics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel. zalevsz@eng.biu.ac.il.

Abstract

In this paper, a design for a 1 × 4 optical power splitter based on the multimode interference (MMI) coupler in a silicon (Si)-gallium nitride (GaN) slot waveguide structure is presented-to our knowledge, for the first time. Si and GaN were found as suitable materials for the slot waveguide structure. Numerical optimizations were carried out on the device parameters using the full vectorial-beam propagation method (FV-BPM). Simulation results show that the proposed device can be useful to divide optical signal energy uniformly in the C-band range (1530-1565 nm) into four output ports with low insertion losses (0.07 dB).

Keywords: multimode interference (MMI); optical splitter; slot waveguide.