An Ultracompact Multimode Waveguide Crossing Based on Subwavelength Asymmetric Y-Junction

• Published in: IEEE photonics journal Vol. 10; no. 4; pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Chang, Weijie, Lu, Luluzi, Ren, Xinshu, Lu, Longhui, Cheng, Mengfan, Liu, Deming, Zhang, Minming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-08-2018
• Subjects: Bars; Integrated optics devices; metamaterials; mode-division multiplexing; Optical waveguides; Performance evaluation; Photonics; Scanning electron microscopy; Silicon; Wavelength measurement
• ISSN: 1943-0655; 1943-0647
• DOI: 10.1109/JPHOT.2018.2847762

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel ultracompact multimode waveguide crossing. The compact asymmetric subwavelength Y-junction is introduced to convert the high-order modes into fundamental ones, enabling one to implement three or more modes simultaneously in the subsequent processing. Our proposed device occupied only a compact footprint of 34 × 34 μm 2 . The measured results indicate our fabricated device exhibited a high performance with the insertion loss less than 0.9 dB, crosstalk lower than -24 dB from 1.52 to 1.60 μm for all the three modes. Moreover, our scheme could be easily expended to implement more modes and will show great potential in dense and large-scale on-chip photonic integration.