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Silicon photonics is an emerging technology which, enabling nanoscale manipulation of light on chips, impacts areas as diverse as communications, computing, and sensing. Wavelength division multiplexing is commonly used to maximize throughput over a single optical channel by modulating multiple data streams on different wavelengths concurrently. Traditionally, wavelength (de)multiplexers are implemented as monolithic devices, separate from the grating coupler, used to couple light into the chip. This paper describes the design and measurement of a grating coupler demultiplexer—a single device which combines both light coupling and demultiplexing capabilities. The device was designed by means of a custom inverse design algorithm which leverages boundary integral Maxwell solvers of extremely rapid convergence as the mesh is refined. To the best of our knowledge, the fabricated device enjoys the lowest insertion loss reported for grating demultiplexers, small size, high splitting ratio, and low coupling-efficiency imbalance between ports, while meeting the fabricability constraints of a standard UV lithography process.

 

This paper introduces an efficient approach for solving the Electric Field Integral Equation (EFIE) with highorder accuracy by explicitly enforcing the continuity of the impressed current densities across boundaries of the surface patch discretization. The integral operator involved is discretized via a Nystrom-collocation approach based on Chebyshev polynomial expansion within each patch and a closed quadrature rule is utilized such that the discretization points inside one patch coincide with those inside another patch on the shared boundary of those two patches. The continuity enforcement is achieved by constructing a mapping from those coninciding points to a vector containing unique discretization points used in the GMRES iterative solver. The proposed approach is applied to the scattering of several different geometries including a sphere, a cube, a NURBS model imported from CAD software, and a dipole structure and results are compared with the Magnetic Field Integral Equation (MFIE) and the EFIE without enforcing continuity to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.