Efficient dielectric–plasmonic interconnect is significant in the design of future electronic–photonic integrated circuits that deal with large data transfer. We propose three designs and analysis of small-footprint couplers that are located at the interface between dielectric and plasmonic waveguides. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed couplers outperform all the works reported in the literature in several aspects including size and coupling efficiency (CE). Our results indicate that the optimum dimensions of the proposed couplers are determined based on whether the coupler is located in the metal side or dielectric side, or the coupler extends equally in both types of materials. The proposed couplers work over a broad frequency range achieving a CE above 88% at the optical communications wavelength 1550 nm. In addition, our results indicate that the CE can be further increased to above 93% by increasing the width of the dielectric waveguide before it is connected to the coupler. Moreover, our proposed designs provide a considerable alignment tolerance, which is needed when aligning the dielectric waveguide to the metal–dielectric–metal waveguide. Our proposed couplers have an impact on the design and miniaturization of nanoscale all-optical devices.

中文翻译：

---

从介电波导到等离子体波导的模式耦合增强

高效的电浆-等离子体互连在未来处理大量数据传输的电子-光子集成电路的设计中具有重要意义。我们提出了三种设计和分析，它们位于电介质和等离激元波导之间的界面上，占用空间小。据我们所知，我们提出的耦合器在尺寸和耦合效率（CE）等几个方面均优于文献中报道的所有工作。我们的结果表明，建议的耦合器的最佳尺寸取决于耦合器是位于金属侧还是介电侧，或者耦合器在两种类型的材料中均等延伸。所提出的耦合器在很宽的频率范围内工作，在1550 nm的光通信波长下可实现88％以上的CE。此外，我们的结果表明，通过在将介质波导连接到耦合器之前增加其宽度，可以将CE进一步提高到93％以上。此外，我们提出的设计提供了相当大的对准公差，这在将介质波导对准金属-介质-金属波导时需要。我们提出的耦合器对纳米级全光学器件的设计和小型化有影响。