IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 12, NO.

1, JANUARY 2000 59

Effects of Grating Heights on Highly Efficient

Unibond SOI Waveguide Grating Couplers
T. W. Ang, G. T. Reed, A. Vonsovici, A. G. R. Evans, P. R. Routley, and M. R. Josey

Abstract—In this letter, we report the first successful experi-

mental evaluation of the effect of grating height upon the output
efficiency of grating couplers as predicted using perturbation
theory. In addition, we have also produced a grating with an
output efficiency of 70%, which is the highest efficiency yet
reported for a silicon-on-insulator waveguide grating coupler.
Index Terms—Electron-beam lithography, grating couplers, in-
tegrated optics, silicon-on-insulator, silicon rectangular gratings,
unibond.

I. INTRODUCTION
Fig. 1. Basic structure of our unibond SOI waveguide rectangular output

S ILICON-ON-INSULATOR (SOI) shows great potential for

fabrication of low cost photonic integrated optical circuits,
and optoelectronic devices such as optical modulators [1], low
grating coupler.

for an SOI grating coupler [11]. This output efficiency can be

loss optical waveguides [2], [3], bends and -junctions [3]. It increased by further optimizing the Si film thickness and the
usually utilizes a silicon layer of several micrometers in thick- grating height, as discussed below.
ness, in order to ensure high efficiency coupling between ex- The basic structure of a rectangular grating coupler in Uni-
ternal devices such as optical fibers and the IO chip. However, bond SOI is shown in Fig. 1. We have designed the gratings
this relatively large silicon layer results in modulation limited at the diffraction order of −1 with an operating wavelength of
to a few tens of megahertz via carrier injection [4], [5]. An al- 1.3 µm at TE polarization. To optimize the output efficiency,
ternative method of efficiently coupling to thin silicon layers the grating period was designed at 0.4 µm to achieve a phase
(<1 µm) will result in higher speed [6]. Grating couplers offer match between the gratings and the waveguide mode [7]
such a possibility. To design an highly efficient grating coupler,
one of the critical factors that affects its output efficiency is the (1)
grating height (depth) [7], [8]. This is because the proportion of
the propagating field being perturbed is dependent on the grating (2)
height, which in turn determines the average refractive index
in the grating region [9]. Subsequently, the effective refractive where is the input laser wavelength in air, is the effective
index of the waveguide can then be evaluated by the effective refractive index of the guiding layer, is the output beam
index method [10]. In this letter, we have successfully shown angle, and is the refractive index of SiO2.
that the experimental values of the grating output efficiencies In our rectangular grating couplers, the desired output beam is
with respect to the grating heights compare well with the pertur- designed toward the superstrate and hence the output efficiency,
bation theory that we have used to design our grating couplers , is defined as
[8]. Therefore, we are able to design or predict the optimum
grating height of the couplers to obtain the maximum output (3)
efficiency toward either the surface or the substrate and hence
a highly efficient waveguide grating coupler. Furthermore, the or
Si rectangular grating coupler that we have fabricated with an
output of 70% has the highest coupling efficiency yet reported (4)

Manuscript received July 21, 1999; revised September 13, 1999. The work
of T. W. Ang was supported by the University of Surrey under an Overseas
Research Studentship award, and by Bookham Technology Ltd.
T. W. Ang, G. T. Reed, and A. Vonsovici are with the School of Electronic
Engineering, Information Technology, and Mathematics, University of Surrey,
Guildford, GU2 5XH, U.K.
A. G. R. Evans, P. R. Routley, and M. R. Josey are with the Department
of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield,
SO17 1BJ, U.K.
Publisher Item Identifier S 1041-1135(00)00351-7.
1041–1135/00$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
where is the output power diffracted toward the superstrate,
is the incident surface wave power propagating in the guiding
layer, and is the transmitted beam power toward the substrate
(see Fig. 1). Both equations are applicable in calculating the
output efficiency of the waveguide grating coupler. However, (4)
will give a higher value than (3) as it assumes a perfect grating
which has no light scattering in directions other than toward the
upper and the lower regions. In addition, it also assumes that
60 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 12, NO. 1, JANUARY 2000

TABLE I
MEASURED OUTPUT EFFICIENCY WITH
VARIOUS GRATING HEIGHTS FOR A Si FILM THICKNESS OF 1 µm

Fig. 2. SEM photograph of a unibond SOI grating coupling with a Si grating

height of 0.3 µm.

all the light is being coupled out of the output grating coupler,
which may not be the case if the fabricated grating coupling
length is not sufficiently long. Thus, strictly speaking, (4) should
be defined as directionality which only considers the ratio of
output beam power between the superstrate and substrate. Nev-
ertheless, many authors have used (4) to calculate their output
efficiency, e.g., [12]. Clearly this gives favorable results and may
be misleading.
Hence, we have used (3) to calculate the output efficiency
toward the superstrate of our grating couplers. To use (3), it
is necessary to evaluate which is more difficult, but can be
done if the loss of the waveguide is known where variable wave-
guide propagation lengths between the input and output couples
allow us to relate the output power to propagation loss [13]. This
method assumes identical coupling for each grating.
The Unibond SOI wafers were obtained from SOITEC
Grenoble, fabricated by the smart cut process [14], with a Si Fig. 3. Theoretical perturbation output efficiency curve versus measured
film thickness of 1.14 µm and a buried SiO2 layer thickness output efficiency data points with various grating heights at Si film thickness
of 0.67 µm to function as a highly reflective buried layer of 1 µm.
[11]. Further details of fabrication of our Unibond SOI grating
coupler samples using electron beam lithography are reported Chang that the perturbation theory gives sufficient accuracy to
elsewhere [11]. the output efficiency calculations which are comparable to the
exact theory [8]. Notice that the maximum theoretical coupling
efficiency occurs at a grating height of 0.16 µm. This gives
II. RESULTS scope for further improvement of the coupling efficiency by
The resulting Si film thickness after fabrication is 1 µm optimizing the grating height. Further improvements are likely
and the samples have different grating heights, , of 0.14, by also varying the Si film thickness and the corresponding
0.23, 0.30, and 0.44 µm, respectively. Fig. 2 shows a SEM buried oxide thickness.
photograph of a grating which has a height of 0.3 µm. The Having said that, the gratings can also be fabricated on SOI
darker region below the Si grating is the 0.67 µm thick buried single-mode rib waveguides [10] using the electron beam lithog-
SiO2 layer. The measured output efficiency of each grating raphy [11] where the expected output efficiency is likely to be
height as determined from (3) is given in Table I. Using almost equal to that of the planar structure, since the effective
perturbation theory developed by Chang [8], we have predicted refractive index of the former is close to the latter.
the output efficiencies of our grating couplers as shown in
Fig. 3 (continuous curve). Also in Fig. 3, the measured output
efficiencies of our samples (Table I) are represented by the data III. CONCLUSION
points. It can be seen from Fig. 3 that the experimental data are Using perturbation theory, we have shown that we are able
close to the theoretical curve, and hence it can be deduced that to predict the output efficiencies with respect to the grating
the theory agrees well with the measured values, even for the heights. This theory allows us to determine the optimum grating
case of a deep grating and a large refractive index difference heights to obtain highly efficient grating couplers with the avail-
dielectric material, such as SOI. This outcome agrees well with able film thickness’. To our knowledge, this is the first suc-
Chang’s simulation results [8] and confirms the claim made by cessful theoretical prediction of measured output efficiency with
ANG et al.: EFFECTS OF GRATING HEIGHTS ON SOI WAVEGUIDE GRATING COUPLERS
reference to the grating heights. The measured output efficiency
of 70% for a Unibond SOI grating coupler, is the highest cou-
pling efficiency yet reported for SOI couplers and this efficiency
can be increased by further optimising the film thickness and
grating height.
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