Ultra-Efficient Silicon-on-Insulator Grating Couplers With Backside Metal Mirrors

Coupling of light from off-chip into highly complex silicon-based devices is currently focus of efforts and research. In this work, the experimental demonstration of a -0.50 dB (89%) coupling efficiency in the C-band with the help of an aperiodic grating coupler design in a 250 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology is shown. Further, this work reports about the latest results regarding focusing grating couplers with footprints of only 30 μm × 30 μm and a measured coupling efficiency of up to -0.93 dB (81%) at 1549 nm. Efficient grating coupler arrays are realized by using an expanded backside metal mirror-strip for the application of fiber arrays. In addition, this work presents aperiodic silicon grating couplers with an enhanced bandwidth to overcome the limited usability of grating couplers in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems.