How to characterize a new light injection/extraction technology? By Guillaume Beaudin PhD Student in Electrical Engineering Université de Sherbrooke

My Background Centre de recherche en nanofabrication et nanocharacterization (CRN²) Microelectronic Telecommunications MEMS Sensors Biomedical Institut interdisciplinaire d’innovation technologique (3IT) New class 100 clean rooms of 450 m² 350 users annually and more comming New 3IT building [ 2/8 ]

Motivations The industry still don’t have standards yet for the light injection. The injection/extraction method are at the interface between the chip and the packaging. The packaging domain is interested in more improvement for the light injection/extraction method principally for passive alignment. [ 3/8 ]

Challenges Because of the large refractive index difference between an optical fiber and a silicon waveguide, the optical mode has to be adapted when light is transfer from one to another to reduce losses. Zimmermann et al., 2008 Illustration of the difference between a typical optical fiber and a silicon waveguide optical modes [ 4/8 ]

Light Injection/Extraction methods 3 popular methods and a new one : Facet injection/extractionGrating coupler Inverted taperNew injection/extraction method [ 5/8 ]

New Technology A new method was developed in the CRN² labs permit low loss injection and extraction (< 1 dB, hopefully). Other method characteristics: Polarisation dependant Do not necessitate high resolution lithography Not very sensitive to the alignment (passive alignment, like V- grooves should be possible) Prototypes were realized in the CRN² labs. A patent is pending on this technology. [ 6/8 ]

Si-EPIC Project The new light injection/extraction technology cannot be fabricated with the actual process. Objective: Finding a way to characterize the “quality” of the optical signal, particularly the polarization. Device ? [ 7/8 ]

Questions [ 8/8 ]