Highly efficient vertical fiber interfacing grating coupler with bilayer anti-reflection cladding and backside metal mirror

A highly efficient bidirectional grating coupler for perfectly vertical coupling is designed. With a Si3N4/SiO2 bilayer structure and a backside metal mirror acting as anti-reflection cladding (ARC) and substrate reflector respectively, the coupling efficiency can be greatly enhanced for a cost-effective uniform grating coupler. To maximize the grating coupling, all the grating parameters including the bilayer thicknesses are fully optimized using numerical simulation method. As a design trade-off between coupling efficiency (CE) and optical bandwidth (OB), CE of 88.3% (−0.54 dB) and 1-dB bandwidth of 61 nm can be obtained. In addition, this grating coupler shows strong fiber misalignment tolerance. With a 2 µm fiber misalignment, the coupling loss increases by less than 0.5 dB and the up-reflection loss increases by less than 2 dB. Also it is found that the splitting behavior of the grating is quite stable near the grating resonant wavelength. Such characteristics make this device very attractive for low-cost photonic packaging and Mach-Zehnder type device applications. In addition, two optimal designs are presented based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method and genetic algorithm (GA). Numerical calculated results show that the coupling efficiency at center wavelength can be further improved compared to that of the balanced design. However, the optical bandwidth suffer at a expense. At last, Fourier analysis of the grating is carried out to analyze the optical field profile and frequency spectrum of the grating region. It is believed such a grating structure can provide flexible designs for different coupler requirements and applications.