Amorphous Si waveguides with high-quality stacked gratings for multi-layer Si optical circuits

To realize a stacked multi-layer silicon-based photonic device, a waveguide with a stacked grating was fabricated by using amorphous Si (a-Si) material, which is suitable for constructing layered structures. The fabrication method was based on forming a flat a-Si layer on a non-flat structure by using only spin-on-glass (SOG) coating technique. The a-Si grating was precisely constructed on the a-Si waveguide with gold alignment marks for electron beam lithography. Transmitted and reflected light power dependence on the grating period, wavelength, and polarization was systematically measured and compared with the designed dependence. As a result, the reflected light power exhibited a characteristic peak structure at a particular wavelength. Remarkable transverse electric/transverse magnetic (TE/TM) mode dependence was also observed. Furthermore, the measured and the designed properties were in excellent agreement with each other. Consequently, the designed structure was well reproduced in the actual stacked structure based on the a-Si material. These results pave the way for novel a-Si based integrated photonic devices such as polarization selectors and wavelength filters, indicating that a-Si is an excellent material for implementing Si-based multi-layer optical circuits.