Mode converter based on an inverse taper for multimode silicon nanophotonic integrated circuits.

An inverse taper on silicon is proposed and designed to realize an efficient mode converter available for the connection between multimode silicon nanophotonic integrated circuits and few-mode fibers. The present mode converter has a silicon-on-insulator inverse taper buried in a 3 × 3μm(2) SiN strip waveguide to deal with not only for the fundamental mode but also for the higher-order modes. The designed inverse taper enables the conversion between the six modes (i.e., TE(11), TE(21), TE(31), TE(41), TM(11), TM(12)) in a 1.4 × 0.22μm(2) multimode SOI waveguide and the six modes (like the LP(01), LP(11a), LP(11b) modes in a few-mode fiber) in a 3 × 3μm(2) SiN strip waveguide. The conversion efficiency for any desired mode is higher than 95.6% while any undesired mode excitation ratio is lower than 0.5%. This is helpful to make multimode silicon nanophotonic integrated circuits (e.g., the on-chip mode (de)multiplexers developed well) available to work together with few-mode fibers in the future.