High efficiency silicon strip waveguide to plasmonic slot waveguide mode converter

    high-efficiency silicon strip waveguide to plasmonic slot waveguide converter based on the hybrid silicon-gold taper is proposed and optimized. Through investigating the mode matching, the effective index matching, and the metallic absorption loss considerations, the hybrid silicon-gold taper with an overall length of 1.7 μm having a very high conversion efficiency of 93.3% at 1550nm is achieved. Besides, the configuration limitations for restricting this mode converter to achieve a 100 % conversion efficiency are also studied in this paper. Such a high efficiency converter will be an essential component in ultra-compact integrated circuits.

DOI:10.1117/12.2080491