Title :
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
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;
Journal_Title :
Lightwave Technology, Journal of
DOI :
10.1109/JLT.2015.2390040
