DEVELOPMENT OF NEXT-GENERATION BUILDING BLOCKS FOR SILICON PHOTONIC INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

Abstract

Silicon photonic ICs start to improve different areas of human life nowadays, similar to the era of silicon electric ICs in 1970s. Due to newly emerging applications, especially the data centers and photonic quantum ICs, some high-performance building blocks tailored for these applications are still missing, such as the process design kit library operating at O-band. In this thesis, various designs of building blocks for silicon photonic ICs operating at O-band. including power splitters, high-extinction optical filters, polarization splitter and rotator (PSR), are investigated, simulated, fabricated and tested for higher performance, in terms of the compactness, fabrication tolerance, and bandwidth. An ultra-compact PSR has been designed and experimentally validated by taking the advantage that bend structure can intrinsically confine TE mode better than TM mode. Moreover, we have proposed and experimentally achieved a CMOS-compatible fabrication-tolerant PSR with an ultra-broad bandwidth exceeding 360 nm, for the first time to the best of our knowledge.