Fabrication-tolerant and CMOS-compatible polarization splitter and rotator based on a compact bent-tapered directional coupler

In this paper, we demonstrate a broadband, low-loss, compact, and fabrication-tolerant polarization splitter and rotator (PSR) on a silicon-on-insulator platform. The PSR is based on an asymmetric directional coupler (ADC), which is covered with SiO2 from the top to make it compatible with the standard metal back end of line (BEOL) process. Conventional ADC-based PSRs suffer from stringent fabrication requirements and relatively low bandwidth, while the proposed bent-tapered design is highly insensitive to the fabrication errors (＞70 nm tolerance on the coupling gap) with an enlarged bandwidth and a compact footprint of 53 µm × 7 µm. It yields a polarization conversion loss less than 0.7 dB, a transverse electric (TE) insertion loss better than 0.3 dB, an ultra-low crosstalk with the TE extinction better than 30 dB, and the transverse magnetic extinction better than 25 dB, over a 200 nm wavelength range (1.5 µm–1.7 µm), in both ports. At the 1.55 µm wavelength, the calculated ultra-low polarization conversion loss and TE insertion loss are 0.27 dB and 0.08 dB, respectively.