813 μm in length and CMOS compatible polarization beam splitter based on an asymmetrical directional coupler

Abstract

A compact silicon polarization beam splitter (PBS) is proposed based on an asymmetrical directional coupler consisting of a wide waveguide and a dielectric loaded narrow waveguide. Given that TE and TM polarizations are the dominant mode in the wide and narrow waveguides, respectively, a perfect phase-matching condition in the TM mode but a huge phase mismatching in the TE mode can be achieved. Therefore, the TE mode is almost uncoupled regardless of device length but the TM mode can only completely couple to the cross port at an appropriate coupling length. An ultrashort (∼8.13 μm long) PBS is designed based on a silicon-on-insulator nanowire with a loading refractive index of 2.0 and a gap width of 200 nm. Numerical simulations show that the proposed PBS has a broad bandwidth (∼100 nm) with large extinction ratio (>10 dB) and low insertion loss (<0.61 dB). The fabrication-error tolerance of the PBS is also discussed.