Design, Simulation and Fabrication of a 90° SOI Optical Hybrid Based on the Self-imaging Principle

摘要

This paper introduces a compact 90° optical hybrid, built on small size SOI waveguide technology .This optical hybrid is a critical component of a potentially low-cost coherent optical receiver design developed within the frame of our Optical Coherent Transmission for Access Network Extensions (OCTANE) project. In previous recent work, 90° optical hybrids were realized in SOI rib waveguide technology with 4 μm top silicon and a rib height of approximately 2 μm. In this paper, we introduce a compact 90° optical hybrid, built on small size SOI waveguide technology (1.5 μm SOI -based rib waveguide, with 0.8μm rib height). The proposed device consists of multimode interferometers (MMIs) connected in such a way that four different vector additions of a reference signal (local oscillator) and the signal to be detected are obtained. At the outputs, the hybrid provides four linear combination of the signal with the reference which differs by a relative phase shift of the reference of 90°. The four output signals are detected by a pair of balanced receivers to provide in-phase and quadrature (I&Q) channels. The phase differences arise naturally from the self imaging property of a MMI.rnThe key elements of the 90° optical hybrid, including a 2×2 MMI, a 4×4 MMI, and polarization diversity configuration have been designed and simulated, using the numerical mode solving tool FIMMPROB. The 2×2 and 4×4 MMI had overall lengths of 701 μm and 3712.5μm lengths respectively. Tapers are used to couple adiabatically single mode waveguides to the entrance and exit ports of the MMI to assure correct operation by avoiding coupling to the higher order transverse modes allowed at the entrance and exit ports of the MMI. The simulation results at 1550nm show polarization independence and phase errors between the ports of less than 0.03 degrees. Currently the design is in fabrication at the Canadian Photonics Fabrication Center with the support of CMC Microsystems and experimental results will be subject to a further report.