Optical crossing and integration using hybrid Si-wire/silica waveguides

We studied the feasibility of an integrated optical circuit consisting of Si-wire waveguides and silica-based waveguides. In order to realize such a hybrid waveguide optical circuit, we investigated a waveguide junction structure based on adiabatic mode conversion with tapered Si and a waveguide crossing structure of heterogeneous waveguides by numerical analysis and measurements. We estimated the optical coupling loss between the waveguides to be 0.39 dB from the measurements. We also estimated the insertion loss of the waveguide crossing to be less than 0.7 dB, and the crosstalk between the waveguides to be less than -35 dB by numerical analysis.