Ultra-compact multimode waveguide bend with shallowly etched grooves

In this work, an ultra-sharp multimode waveguide bend (MWB) based on gradient shallowly etched grooves is proposed and demonstrated. With a bending radius of only 5.6 mu m, our shallowly-etched-groove multimode waveguide bend (SMWB) can enable low excess loss and low-crosstalk propagation with the four lowest-order TE mode-channels, simultaneously. In the simulation, the excess losses of the proposed 90 degrees- SMWB for TE0-TE3 are all below 0.46 dB and the inter-mode crosstalks are lower than -18 dB in 1500 nm-1600 nm. Furthermore, the measured results of the fabricated 90 degrees- SMWB show that the excess losses for TE0-TE3 are less than 1 dB and the inter-mode crosstalks are all below -14 dB in 1510 nm-1580 nm. Such a proposed device thus provides a promising solution for ultra-compact MWBs in multimode silicon photonics. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement