Subject Area

Mechanical Engineering

Abstract

In this thesis, compact 2-by-2 and 4-by-4 trench couplers in the silicon photonics material system have been designed, fabricated, and tested. The couplers operate on the principle of frustrated total internal reflection, allowing a footprint significantly smaller than industry standard y-couplers. As photonic integration evolves, larger scales of integration will benefit from such reduction in component size. The couplers were manufactured at the AIM silicon photonics foundry using processes available to multi-project wafer runs. The characterization of the trench couplers involves novel use of U-turns to provide efficiency estimates. For this generation of trench coupler, the experimental loss is measured as -1.2dB and -3.2dB, respectively. Further development is encouraged by the fact that in the single-photon regime the 2-by-2 and 4-by-4 trench couplers are physical realizations of the Hadamard and Chrestensen gates which are ubiquitous to quantum computing.

Degree Date

Winter 12-17-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.M.E.

Department

Mechanical Engineering

Format

.pdf

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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