Foundry-fabricated grating coupler demultiplexer inverse-designed via fast integral methods

Abstract Silicon photonics is an emerging technology which, enabling nanoscale manipulation of light on chips, impacts areas as diverse communications, computing, and sensing. Wavelength division multiplexing commonly used to maximize throughput over a single optical channel by modulating multiple data streams different wavelengths concurrently. Traditionally, wavelength (de)multiplexers are implemented monolithic devices, separate from the grating coupler, couple into chip. This paper describes design measurement coupler demultiplexer—a device which combines both coupling demultiplexing capabilities. The was designed means custom inverse algorithm leverages boundary integral Maxwell solvers extremely rapid convergence mesh refined. To best our knowledge, fabricated enjoys lowest insertion loss reported for demultiplexers, small size, high splitting ratio, low coupling-efficiency imbalance between ports, while meeting fabricability constraints standard UV lithography process.