A high efficiency silicon nitride waveguide grating coupler with a multilayer bottom reflector

Sci Rep. 2019 Sep 10;9(1):12988. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-49324-5.

Abstract

We propose a high efficiency apodized grating coupler with a bottom reflector for silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits. The reflector consists of a stack of alternate silicon nitride and silicon dioxide quarter-wave films. The design, fabrication and optical characterization of the couplers has been presented. The measured fiber to detector insertion loss was -3.5 dB which corresponds to a peak coupling efficiency of -1.75 dB. A 3 dB wavelength bandwidth of 76.34 nm was demonstrated for the grating coupler with a 20-layer reflector. The fabrication process is CMOS-compatible and requires only a single etching step.