Coupling strategies for silicon photonics integrated chips[Invited]

Over the last 20 years, silicon photonics has revolutionized the field of integrated optics, providing a novel and powerful platform to build mass-producible optical circuits. One of the most attractive aspects of silicon photonics is its ability to provide extremely small optical components, whose typical dimensions are an order of magnitude smaller than those of optical fiber devices. This dimension difference makes the design of fiberto-chip interfaces challenging and, over the years, has stimulated considerable technical and research efforts in the field. Fiber-to-silicon photonic chip interfaces can be broadly divided into two principle categories:in-plane and out-of-plane couplers. Devices falling into the first category typically offer relatively high coupling efficiency, broad coupling bandwidth(in wavelength), and low polarization dependence but require relatively complex fabrication and assembly procedures that are not directly compatible with wafer-scale testing.Conversely, out-of-plane coupling devices offer lower efficiency, narrower bandwidth, and are usually polarization dependent. However, they are often more compatible with high-volume fabrication and packaging processes and allow for on-wafer access to any part of the optical circuit. In this paper, we review the current state-of-the-art of optical couplers for photonic integrated circuits, aiming to give to the reader a comprehensive and broad view of the field, identifying advantages and disadvantages of each solution. As fiber-to-chip couplers are inherently related to packaging technologies and the co-design of optical packages has become essential, we also review the main solutions currently used to package and assemble optical fibers with silicon-photonic integrated circuits.

3D-printed facet-attached microlenses for advanced photonic system assembly

Wafer-level mass production of photonic integrated circuits(PIC)has become a technological mainstay in the field of optics and photonics,enabling many novel and disrupting a wide range of existing applications.However,scalable photonic packaging and system assembly still represents a major challenge that often hinders commercial adoption of PIC-based solutions.Specifically,chip-to-chip and fiber-to-chip connections often rely on so-called active alignment techniques,where the coupling efficiency is continuously measured and optimized during the assembly process.This unavoidably leads to technically complex assembly processes and high cost,thereby eliminating most of the inherent scalability advantages of PIC-based solutions.In this paper,we demonstrate that 3D-printed facet-attached microlenses(FaML)can overcome this problem by opening an attractive path towards highly scalable photonic system assembly,relying entirely on passive assembly techniques based on industry-standard machine vision and/or simple mechanical stops.FaML can be printed with high precision to the facets of optical components using multi-photon lithography,thereby offering the possibility to shape the emitted beams by freely designed refractive or reflective surfaces.Specifically,the emitted beams can be collimated to a comparatively large diameter that is independent of the device-specific mode fields,thereby relaxing both axial and lateral alignment tolerances.Moreover,the FaML concept allows to insert discrete optical elements such as optical isolators into the free-space beam paths between PIC facets.We show the viability and the versatility of the scheme in a series of selected experiments of high technical relevance,comprising pluggable fiber-chip interfaces,the combination of PIC with discrete micro-optical elements such as polarization beam splitters,as well as coupling with ultra-low back-reflection based on non-planar beam paths that only comprise tilted optical surfaces.Based on our results,we believe that the FaML concept opens an attractive path towards novel PIC-based system architectures that combine the distinct advantages of different photonic integration platforms.