Abstract

We demonstrate that stress engineering is an effective tool to modify or eliminate polarization dispersion in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguide devices, for a wide range of waveguide cross-section shapes and dimensions. The stress-induced effects on the modal birefringence of SOI waveguides are investigated numerically and experimentally. Finite-element simulations show that while the birefringence of ridge waveguides with both slanted and vertical sidewalls can be effectively modified using cladding stress, the birefringence becomes much less sensitive to dimension fluctuations with decreasing sidewall slope. To efficiently simulate the stress-induced effects we propose a normalized plane-strain model which can achieve comparable accuracy as a fully generalized plane-strain model but requires significantly less computational resources. Excellent agreement is achieved between the calculated and measured birefringence tuning using SiO2 cladding induced stress. Finally, both calculations and experiments confirm that cladding induced stress can be used to eliminate the birefringence in SOI waveguides of arbitrary shapes, for typical SiO2 film stress values (sigma_film approximately -100 to -300 MPa) and cladding thicknesses of the order of 1 µm or less.

© 2005 IEEE

Eliminating the birefringence in silicon-on-insulator ridge waveguides by use of cladding stress

D.-X. Xu, P. Cheben, D. Dalacu, A. Delâge, S. Janz, B. Lamontagne, M.-J. Picard, and W. N. Ye
Opt. Lett. 29(20) 2384-2386 (2004)

Stress-induced birefringence control in optical planar waveguides

Xiuli Zhao, Chunfei Li, and Y. Z. Xu
Opt. Lett. 28(7) 564-566 (2003)

Analysis of the birefringence of a silicon-on-insulator rib waveguide

Daoxin Dai and Sailing He
Appl. Opt. 43(5) 1156-1161 (2004)

Thermally induced birefringence and stress in poly(methyl methacrylate) waveguides on oxidized silicon substrates

John C. Pincenti, Sanjay Goel, and David L. Naylor
Appl. Opt. 32(3) 322-326 (1993)

Rib waveguides for mid-infrared silicon photonics

Milan M. Milošević, Petar S. Matavulj, Pengyuan Y. Yang, Alvise Bagolini, and Goran Z. Mashanovich
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 26(9) 1760-1766 (2009)