How to characterize a new light injection/extraction technology?

By

Guillaume Beaudingui l laume.beaudin@usherbrooke.ca

PhD Student in Electr ical Engineer ing

Univers ité de Sherbrooke

My Background• Centre de recherche en

nanofabrication et nanocharacterization (CRN²)

• Microelectronic• Telecommunications• MEMS• Sensors • Biomedical

• Institut interdisciplinaire d’innovation technologique (3IT)

• New class 100 clean rooms of 450 m²

• 350 users annually and more comming

New 3IT building [2/8]

Motivations• The industry still don’t have standards yet for the light injection.

• The injection/extraction method are at the interface between the chip and the packaging.

• The packaging domain is interested in more improvement for the light injection/extraction method principally for passive alignment.

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Challenges• Because of the large refractive index difference between an optical

fiber and a silicon waveguide, the optical mode has to be adapted when light is transfer from one to another to reduce losses.

Zimmermann et al., 2008

Illustration of the difference between a typical optical fiber and a silicon waveguide optical modes

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Light Injection/Extraction methods• 3 popular methods and a new one :

Facet injection/extraction Grating coupler

Inverted taper New injection/extraction method [5/8]

New Technology• A new method was developed in the CRN² labs permit low loss injection

and extraction (< 1 dB, hopefully).

• Other method characteristics:

• Polarisation dependant• Do not necessitate high resolution lithography• Not very sensitive to the alignment (passive alignment, like V-

grooves should be possible)

• Prototypes were realized in the CRN² labs. A patent is pending on this technology.

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Si-EPIC Project• The new light injection/extraction technology cannot be fabricated with

the actual process.

• Objective:

• Finding a way to characterize the “quality” of the optical signal, particularly the polarization.

Device

?

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Questions

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