Proposal for a Grating Waveguide Serving as Both a Polarization Splitter and an Efficient Coupler for Silicon-on-Insulator Nanophotonic Circuits

A grating waveguide is introduced and designed to serve as both a polarization splitter and an efficient vertical coupler between a fiber and a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) nanophotonic waveguide. Through this grating waveguide, the light from the fiber can be efficiently coupled into an SOI chip where the two orthogonally polarized waves are separated to travel towards the opposite directions along the waveguide. According to our simulations, the optimized structure can give a high coupling efficiency of about 50% for both polarizations, as well as a large bandwidth of over 70 nm and a very low polarization crosstalk below -22 dB at the output ports.