Silicon Nitride Grating Coupler with Flexible Bandwidth Incorporating a Serially Concatenated Multimode Interference Filter

A compact silicon nitride grating coupler with flexible bandwidth was demonstrated taking advantage of a basic grating integrated with a serially connected multistage multimode interference (MMI) filter. The spectral response could be tailored by varying the order of the MMI filter, without affecting the basic grating structure. The dependence of the spectral response of the proposed device on the order of the MMI stage was thoroughly investigated. As regards the fabricated grating coupler with a four-stage MMI filter, the observed spectral bandwidth was efficiently altered from 53 to 21 nm in the ?1550 nm spectral band.