Athermal silicon nitride angled MMI wavelength division (de)multiplexers for the near-infrared.

WDM components fabricated on the silicon-on-insulator platform have transmission characteristics that are sensitive to dimensional errors and temperature variations due to the high refractive index and thermo-optic coefficient of Si, respectively. We propose the use of NH3-free SiNx layers to fabricate athermal (de)multiplexers based on angled multimode interferometers (AMMI) in order to achieve good spectral responses with high tolerance to dimensional errors. With this approach we have shown that stoichiometric and N-rich SiNx layers can be used to fabricate AMMIs with cross-talk <30dB, insertion loss <2.5dB, sensitivity to dimensional errors <120pm/nm, and wavelength shift <10pm/°C.