6 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO.

1, JANUARY 1, 2011

Slab-Modulated Sidewall Bragg Gratings in

Silicon-on-Insulator Ridge Waveguides
Guomin Jiang, Ruiyi Chen, Qiang Zhou, Jianyi Yang, Member, IEEE, Minghua Wang, and
Xiaoqing Jiang, Member, IEEE

Abstract—A slab-modulated sidewall Bragg grating realized by

periodically structural corrugation in the sides of silicon slab is
demonstrated on a silicon-on-insulator ridge waveguide. Based on
this structure, narrow bandwidth can be accurately controlled by
varying the distance between the slab grating region and the ridge
with high fabrication tolerance. And low side lobes can also be con-
veniently achieved by changing the extent of sidewall grating teeth.
Experimental results show that bandwidths of the example devices
can be changed from 0.64 to 1.4 nm, which agree well with the sim-
ulated results.
Index Terms—Bragg scattering, gratings, ridge waveguide, sil-
icon-on-insulator (SOI) technology.
I. INTRODUCTION
RAGG gratings play a significant role in optical devices,
B such as switching, laser, and wavelength-division mul-
tiplexing (WDM) [1]–[3]. Recently, resonant structures on
a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform [4], [5] show obvious
advantages, owning to its compatibility with low-cost com-
plementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process and
its unique high-refractive-index-contrast (HRIC) introduced
optical properties. However, HRIC brings challenges to the
realization of narrow bandwidth and low side lobes Bragg
gratings. The narrow bandwidth depending on weak-coupling
coefficient which is determined by the amplitude of the modu-
lation [6], and the low side lobes obtained from the apodization
which is introduced by varying the grating’s duty cycle [7],
are both restricted by the etching resolution in patterning these
structures [8], [9], especially for the submicrometer Bragg
gratings. Later, a sidewall grating that can easily achieve the
apodization is reported [8], but it is difficult to precisely control
weak-coupling coefficient and the fabrication tolerance is very
low. Recently, a cladding-modulated distributed resonant struc-
ture was proposed to overcome the limitation of precise control
of the weak-coupling coefficient [9], whereas it is flawed in
that achieving apodization is too difficult.
Manuscript received June 29, 2010; revised September 28, 2010; accepted
October 16, 2010. Date of publication October 25, 2010; date of current version
December 15, 2010. This work was supported by the Natural Basic Research
Program of China (2007CB613405), and by the Natural Science Foundation of
China (60777015).
The authors are with the Department of Information Science and Elec-
tronics Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China (e-mail:
iseejxq@zju.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2010.2089613
1041-1135/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of (a) cross-section of SOI ridge waveguide and (b)
the top view of the grating.
In this letter, a slab-modulated sidewall Bragg grating is pro-
posed in order to precisely control weak-coupling coefficient
and conveniently achieve apodization. It is implemented using
periodically structural corrugation in the sides of silicon slab.
The weak-coupling coefficient and the narrow bandwidth can be
accurately controlled by varying the distance between the slab
grating region and the ridge. The apodization for low side lobes
can be achieved by changing the extent of the sidewall grating
teeth. By reducing the ridge width, the modulation range of the
coupling coefficient and the bandwidth can be extended. Note
that when the width of the grating region is larger than the crit-
ical value, its influence on the coupling coefficient and the band-
width can almost be neglected. By using these approaches, both
accurate control of narrowband with high fabrication tolerance
and low side lobes can be realized simultaneously. The design
and characterizations of the slab-modulated sidewall gratings
are presented in this letter as well as their fabrication and exper-
imental verification.
II. DEVICE STRUCTURE AND ANALYSIS
A. Device Structure
The proposed device is obtained by the periodically corru-
gated recesses in both sides of the silicon slab. The grating re-
gion of width is situated a distance from the edge of the
ridge, as shown schematically in Fig. 1. The SOI wafer consists
of a thin top silicon layer of 220 nm on the buried oxide layer of
2 m. The thickness of the silicon slab is 150 nm and the ridge
height is 70 nm. The width of the ridge is and the length of
the grating is . The period of the grating will be selected to
satisfy the Bragg condition at a wavelength of about 1.55 m
for the transverse-electric (TE) mode.
B. Analysis
Considering the distribution of fundamental TE mode in the
ridge waveguide, the amplitude of the electric field in the grating
region is much smaller than that of the peak field at the ridge.
So the field amplitude in the grating region varies slowly with
JIANG et al.: SLAB-MODULATED SIDEWALL BRAGG GRATINGS IN SOI RIDGE WAVEGUIDES 7

, and the strength of mode coupling can be gradually changed

by adjusting . The coupling coefficient of a uniform Bragg
grating can be found from coupling-mode theory (CMT) [9],
[10]

(1)

where is the free-space propagation constant, is the TE

mode propagation constant, is the refractive index pertur-
bation, and is the unperturbed TE-polarized electric field. A
finite-difference method is exploited to calculate the distribu-
tion of the field. The peak reflectivity for a grating with the
length of is given by [11]

(2)

The bandwidth is defined as the width between the first zeros on

either side of the central lobe and can also be found from CMT
[9], [11] as

(3)

Fig. 2.  (black online) and1 (blue online) as a function of d calculated

where [12] is the group index of the using CMT with (a) W = 1000 nm and (b) W = 500 nm.
mode. It can be easily deduced from (1) that can be changed
slowly with because of the slow variation of field amplitude
in the grating region, and according to (3) the bandwidth of
grating changes as changes. Therefore, gratings with different
and can be implemented by only adjusting . The relation-
ships of , , and with different ridge widths are illustrated
in Fig. 2, with m and nm. and vary
slowly with in this weakly coupled situation, thus by using this
grating, the restriction of the etching resolution is overcome, and
specific weak-coupling coefficient and narrow bandwidth with
high fabrication tolerance is accurately achieved. Since be-
comes increasingly dependent on when , it will ap-
proach the limit of nm as increases gradually. And the Fig. 3.  (black online) and 1 (blue) as a function of D calculated using
modulation range of and can be extended by reducing the CMT.
width of the ridge, as shown in Fig. 2.
and also vary with the width of the grating region
which can be deduced from the CMT, and the simulated results apodization by changing the extent of sidewall grating teeth,
are shown in Fig. 3, with m nm and which eliminates limitation of etching resolution that turns up
nm. According to the simulation, and will ap- when varying duty cycles or etch depth. The reflection spectra
proach maxima rapidly as increases which is quite different for both uniform and apodized slab-modulated sidewall gratings
from that of all other reported gratings. The field amplitude de- have been simulated. The uniform grating exhibits obvious side
cays rapidly in silicon slab, thus the added grating region with lobes over dB. In contrast, the apodized grating holds no
smaller field amplitude has little contribution to the coupling of side lobes exceeding dB, which suits particularly devices
the modes. Therefore, when is larger than the critical value, that require low side lobes.
its influence on and can almost be neglected. This charac-
teristic enables more accurate control of and by changing
III. FABRICATION AND DISCUSSION
with high fabrication tolerance.
Although a uniform grating presents high reflectivity at the In the verification experiment, two example grating devices A
design wavelength, it also induces large side lobes outside the and B are chosen, both with m, nm, and
stop band, which introduces crosstalk between nearby WDM nm. The differences between them are nm,
channels [8]. In practical applications, an apodized grating is nm and nm, nm. Both of the
commonly chosen to reduce the undesirable side lobes. The devices are apodized using Gaussian profile. The calculated
slab-modulated sidewall Bragg grating conveniently achieves of A and B are 1.74 per mm and 3.15 per mm, and are 0.75
8 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 23, NO. 1, JANUARY 1, 2011
Fig. 4. CMT simulated transmission spectra for (a) device A with
d = 200 nm, 3 = 280
nm and (b) device B with d nm, = 140
3 = 285nm.
Fig. 5. SEM micrographs of fabricated device A.
Fig. 6. Measured transmission spectra for (a) device A and (b) device B.
and 1.49 nm, respectively. Fig. 4 shows the simulated results of
the transmission spectra for these two devices.
The devices with configurations A and B are patterned with
193-nm deep-ultraviolet lithography on an SOI platform at the
Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC). Fig. 5 presents
the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs of fabri-
cated device A. The propagation loss of the presented waveg-
uides is about 2.5 dB/cm, and the introduced loss of the grating
is about 3 dB. The experimental measurement of transmission
spectra for device A and device B are shown in Fig. 6. Both
and of the two devices increase when decreases. The ex-
perimental measurements of A (0.64 nm) and B (1.4 nm)
in Fig. 6 are consistent with the simulated results (0.75 and
1.49 nm, respectively) in Fig. 4, and the slight difference may
be attributed to the etching flaw of the rectangular grating teeth.
The transmission minima of both devices do not agree very well
with expected. This may arise from the energy loss of devices
and the limitation of measurements accuracy. The presence of
side lobes in the transmission spectra for device A may result
from the defect of the apodization. Meanwhile, there are small
oscillations in the transmission spectra for both devices, which
may be caused by the coupling gratings on both ends of devices
and the defect of the apodization.
IV. CONCLUSION
We have presented a slab-modulated sidewall Bragg grating
on an SOI platform that realizes accurate control of narrow
bandwidth with high fabrication tolerance and easily achieves
low side lobes simultaneously. Experimental results show that
narrow bandwidths of devices can be changed from 0.64 to
1.4 nm, which agree well with the simulated results. Based on
the discussions above, the proposed grating will surely have
wide application in optical devices that require narrowband
and low side lobes such as WDM channel add/drop filters and
switching.
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