A Selection of Building Blocks in Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits

In recent times, silicon photonics have received much attention mainly for applications in data centres and communications. This work reports our recent results in a number of pertinent components necessary to realise successful implementation on silicon-on-insulator platform. We report design, modeling, and fabrication of inverse taper couplers, broadband directional couplers and polarization beam splitters. We achieved fiber-to-chip coupling loss of <2dB, ~50% splitting over bandwidth of 100 nm and polarisation extinction ratios ~40dB (both TE and TM) were obtained respectively. Furthermore, we report design and simulation of ring resonator modulators and silicon-germanium detectors with an extinction ratio of ~20dB and dark currents of ~100 nA and responsivity of 0.9A/W were obtained. Additionally, we also report polarization-independent configurations for slot waveguides that are suitable for sensing applications.