Design of Highly Efficient Hybrid Si-Au Taper for Dielectric Strip Waveguide to Plasmonic Slot Waveguide Mode Converter

Author

Chin-Ta Chen ; Xiaochuan Xu ; Hosseini, Amir ; Zeyu Pan ; Subbaraman, Harish ; Xingyu Zhang ; Chen, Ray T.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Microelectron. Res. Center, Austin, TX, USA

Volume

33

Issue

2

fYear

2015

fDate

Jan.15, 15 2015

Firstpage

535

Lastpage

540

Abstract

In this paper, we design a dielectric-to-plasmonic slot waveguide mode converter based on the hybrid silicon-gold taper. The effects of mode matching, the effective index matching, and the metallic absorption loss on the conversion efficiency are studied. Consequently, a metallic taper-funnel coupler with an overall length of 1.7 μm is designed to achieve a very high conversion efficiency of 93.3% at 1550 nm. The configuration limitations for not allowing this mode converter to achieve a 100% conversion efficiency are also investigated. Such a high-efficiency converter can provide practical routes to realize ultracompact integrated circuits.

Keywords

gold; integrated optics; optical couplers; optical design techniques; optical interconnections; optical losses; optical waveguides; optical wavelength conversion; plasmonics; silicon; Si-Au; configuration limitation; dielectric strip waveguide; dielectric-to-plasmonic slot waveguide mode converter; effective index matching; high conversion efficiency; high-efficiency converter; highly efficient hybrid Si-Au taper design; hybrid silicon-gold taper; metallic absorption loss; metallic taper-funnel coupler; mode matching; size 1.7 mum; ultracompact integrated circuits; wavelength 1550 nm; Absorption; Couplers; Gold; Indexes; Optical waveguides; Plasmons; Silicon; Nanophotonics; nanophotonics; photonic integrated circuit; subwavelength optical interconnects; surface plasmons;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Lightwave Technology, Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0733-8724

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/JLT.2015.2390040

Filename

7009953