Surface trimming of silicon photonics devices using controlled reactive ion etching chemistry

Surface trimming of rib waveguides fabricated in 5-μm SOI substrate has been carried out successfully without any significant increase of propagation losses. A reactive ion etching chemistry has been optimized for trimming and an empirical model has been developed to obtain the resulting waveguide geometries. This technique has been used to demonstrate smaller footprint devices like multimode interference based power splitters and ring resonators after defining them photolithographically with relatively large cross-section rib waveguides. We have been also successful to fabricate 2D tapered spot-size converter useful for monolithic integration of waveguides with varying heights and widths. The taper length is again precisely controlled by photolithographic definition. Minimum insertion loss of such a spot-size converter integrated between waveguides with 3-μm height difference has been recorded to be ∼2 dB. It has been also shown that the overall fiber-to-chip coupling loss can be reduced by >3 dB by using such spot-size converters at the input/output side of the waveguides.