Vertical Injection and Wideband Grating Coupler Based on Asymmetric Grating Trenches

Abstract: A Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) perfectly vertical fibre-to-chip grating coupler is proposed and designed based on engineered subwavelength structures. The high directionality of the coupler is achieved by implementing step gratings to realize asymmetric diffraction and by applying effective index variation with auxiliary ultra-subwavelength gratings. The proposed structure is numerically analysed by using two-dimensional Finite Difference Time Domain (2D FDTD) method and achieves 76% (-1.19 dB) coupling efficiency and 39 nm 1-dB bandwidth.