Reduction in Crosstalk Using Uniform Germanium Strips for Dense Integration of Photonic Waveguides

The requirement of low crosstalk between the neighboring waveguides should be considered essentially, in order to achieve the compact photonic integrated circuit (PIC), which includes photonic waveguides. Literature shows that the lower crosstalk can be realized by using the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) based waveguide, having an appropriate separation between them. The current work is focused on reducing the waveguide separation to further improve the photonic integration over the PICs. This has been achieved by inserting the germanium strips between the photonic waveguides. The investigations of the impact of variations in heights and widths of germanium strip have demonstrated that the crosstalk can be reduced by a significant amount, which provides noteworthy improvement in coupling length. The maximum coupling lengths of 81578 µm, 67099 µm, and 66810 µm have been achieved at their respective end-to-end separations of 300 nm, 250 nm, and 200 nm, and their corresponding minimum crosstalk values have been noted as -29.40 dB, -27.71 dB, and − 27.70 dB. Moreover, the analysis to realize the coupling length for Ge-strip, have been compared with the Si-, and SiN-strips. The approach presented in the current work can be utilized for the design of many compact photonic applications, such as polarization splitter, integrated photonic switches, etc.