Silicon Nanowire-Assisted High Uniform Arrayed Waveguide Grating

Shuo Yuan; Jijun Feng; Zhiheng Yu; Jian Chen; Haipeng Liu; Yishu Chen; Song Guo; Fengli Huang; Ryoichi Akimoto; Heping Zeng

doi:10.3390/nano13010182

Silicon Nanowire-Assisted High Uniform Arrayed Waveguide Grating

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2022 Dec 30;13(1):182. doi: 10.3390/nano13010182.

Authors

Shuo Yuan¹, Jijun Feng¹, Zhiheng Yu¹, Jian Chen¹, Haipeng Liu¹, Yishu Chen¹, Song Guo¹, Fengli Huang², Ryoichi Akimoto³, Heping Zeng^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Shanghai Key Laboratory of Modern Optical System, Engineering Research Center of Optical Instrument and System, Ministry of Education, School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 200093, China.
² Key Laboratory of Medical Electronics and Digital Health of Zhejiang Province, Jiaxing University, Jiaxing 314001, China.
³ Research Institute for Advanced Electronics and Photonics, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba 305-8568, Japan.
⁴ Chongqing Key Laboratory of Precision Optics, Chongqing Institute of East China Normal University, Chongqing 401120, China.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China.

Abstract

Determining how to improve the non-uniformity of arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) is of great significance for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems. In this work, a silicon nanowire-assisted AWG structure is proposed, which can achieve high uniformity with a low insertion loss. The article compares the effect of nanowire number and shape on uniformity and insertion loss, finding that double nanowires provide the best performance. Double nanowires with a width of 230 nm and length of 3.5 μm can consist of a slot configuration between arrayed waveguides, both connecting to the star coupler and spacing 165 nm from the waveguides. Compared with conventional 8- and 16-channel AWGs with channel spacing of 200 GHz, the non-uniformity of the presented structure can be improved from 1.09 and 1.6 dB to 0.24 and 0.63 dB, respectively. The overall footprint of the device would remain identical, which is 276 × 299 or 258 × 303 μm² for the 8- or 16-channel AWG. The present high uniformity design is simple and easy to fabricate without any additional insertion loss, which is expected to be widely applied in the highly integrated DWDM systems.

Keywords: arrayed waveguide grating; nanowire; silicon photonics; uniformity.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFE0107400), National Natural Science Foundation of China (11774235, 11933005, 61705130, and 11727812), Shanghai Rising-Star Program (19QA1406100), Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning, and Open Project Program of the Key Laboratory of Medical Electronics and Digital Health of Zhejiang Province.