Despite significant advances in silicon photonics, optical packaging and interconnection of photonic integrated circuits constitutes a large portion of the associated manufacturing costs. Optical fibers are the dominant approach to optical interconnection. However, techniques that rely on fibers lack scalability, have low efficiency and show poor misalignment tolerance. Proposed alternative solutions using polymer waveguides have shown improved coupling efficiency, misalignment tolerance and scalability. Here we present the design, simulation and the experimental confirmation of an adiabatic silicon nitride taper to polymer waveguide coupler with only 0.52 dB of TE coupling loss at 1550-nm wavelength, excluding material loss. The coupler demonstrates $\pm 4~\mu \text{m}$ of lateral misalignment tolerance with a 1-dB penalty which, to the best of our knowledge, is the highest reported tolerance for silicon nitride to polymer waveguide coupling.

中文翻译：

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用于密集互连的宽松公差低损耗绝热 Si3N4 至聚合物波导耦合器

尽管硅光子学取得了重大进展，但光子集成电路的光学封装和互连构成了相关制造成本的很大一部分。光纤是光互连的主要方法。然而，依赖于光纤的技术缺乏可扩展性，效率低，并且显示出较差的错位容忍度。提出的使用聚合物波导的替代解决方案已显示出改进的耦合效率、未对准容差和可扩展性。在这里，我们展示了绝热氮化硅锥形到聚合物波导耦合器的设计、模拟和实验确认，在 1550 nm 波长处仅 0.52 dB 的 TE 耦合损耗，不包括材料损耗。耦合器演示 $\pm 4~\mu \text{m}$ 具有 1-dB 代价的横向未对准容差，据我们所知，这是氮化硅与聚合物波导耦合的最高报告容差。