Novel adiabatic tapered couplers for active III-V/SOI devices fabricated through transfer printing.

We present the design of two novel adiabatic tapered coupling structures that allow efficient and alignment tolerant mode conversion between a III-V membrane waveguide and a single-mode SOI waveguide in active heterogeneously integrated devices. Both proposed couplers employ a broad intermediate waveguide to facilitate highly alignment tolerant coupling. This robustness is needed to comply with the current misalignment tolerance requirements for high-throughput transfer printing. The proposed coupling structures are expected to pave the way for transfer-printing-based heterogeneous integration of active III-V devices such as semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), photodetectors, electro-absorption modulators (EAMs) and single wavelength lasers on silicon photonic integrated circuits.