Low-loss, compact, and fabrication-tolerant Si-wire 90° waveguide bend using clothoid and normal curves for large scale photonic integrated circuits

Ultimately low-loss 90 degrees waveguide bend composed of clothoid and normal curves is proposed for dense optical interconnect photonic integrated circuits. By using clothoid curves at the input and output of 90 degrees waveguide bend, straight and bent waveguides are smoothly connected without increasing the footprint. We found that there is an optimum ratio of clothoid curves in the bend and the bending loss can be significantly reduced compared with normal bend. 90% reduction of the bending loss for the bending radius of 4 mu m is experimentally demonstrated with excellent agreement between theory and experiment. The performance is compared with the waveguide bend with offset, and the proposed bend is superior to the waveguide bend with offset in terms of fabrication tolerance. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America