Design and fabrication of a high-performance binary blazed grating coupler for perfectly perpendicular coupling

A high-performance binary blazed grating coupler (BBGC) on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform for perfectly vertical coupling has been proposed. The period and the etching depth of the grating and the fill factors of the sub-gratings are simulated optimally with manufacturable feature sizes, and the coupling efficiency (CE) is as high as −1.78 dB at 1550 nm with a broad 3-dB bandwidth of around 100 nm. Then, a BBGC with the CE of −3.69 dB at 1550.5 nm and a 3-dB bandwidth of about 70 nm was experimentally demonstrated. Moreover, a large process tolerance of about 20 nm on the narrower sub-grating width was proved, achieving the insertion loss lower than −4.64 dB at 1550 nm. The realization of the BBGC on a SOI platform is simple, repeatable, and compatible with standard complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology.