Bidirectional grating based interleaved angled MMI for high-uniformity wavelength division (de)multiplexing and surface-normal fiber packaging

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a vertical fiber interfacing interleaved angled multimode interference (MMI) coupler for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) applications. This four-channel WDM device comprises two 1 × 2 angled MMI couplers and a bidirectional grating-based Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) structure. In the MZI optical interleaver, the uniform bidirectional grating functions as both the perfectly vertical grating coupler and the 3 dB power splitter. Benefitting from the flat-top coupling spectrum of the grating coupler, a high-uniformity wavelength-division (de)multiplexing can be achieved with a simulated insertion loss of 3.15–3.36 dB (the nonuniformity of 0.22 dB). The angled MMIs (AMMIs) are designed and optimized using the eigenmode expansion method. For wavelength matching between the MZI and AMMIs, the circuit simulation model of the interleaved AMMI is built by importing the S-parameter matrices of all the optical components extracted from the physical level simulations. The device was fabricated using standard CMOS technology and all the features were patterned with the 193-nm deep-UV lithography. Experimental results obtained without thermal tuning are in good agreement with the simulation results. The device exhibits an insertion loss of 4.5–4.65 dB (nonuniformity of 0.15 dB), channel spacing of 10 nm, and cross talk of − ( 21.62 − 26 ) d B .