Tutorial on Silicon Photonics Integrated Platform Fiber Edge Coupling

Abstract: Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) play a crucial role in almost every aspect of modern life, such as data storage, telecommunications, medical diagnostics, green energy, autonomous driving, agriculture, and high-performance computing. To fully harness their benefits, an efficient coupling mechanism is required to successfully launch light into waveguides from fibers. This study introduces low-loss coupling strategies and their implementation for a silicon nitride integrated platform. Here we present an overview of coupling technologies, optimized designs, and a tutorial on manufacturing techniques for inverted tapers, which enable effective coupling for both transverse-magnetic and transverse-electric modes. The optimized coupling losses for the UHNA-7 fiber and the inverted taper Si3N4 coupler reached -0.15 dB at 1550 nm per connection for single-mode waveguides with 220x1200 nm cross section. The measured coupling losses in the inverted taper coupler with a standard single-mode fiber were -1.50 dB at 1550 nm per connection for the same platform.