Compact silicon three-mode multiplexer by refractive-index manipulation on a multi-mode interferometer.

Mode-division multiplexing can scale the capacity of optical communications and optical interconnects. We demonstrate an ultra-compact and fabrication-error tolerant silicon three-mode multiplexer by shallowly etching rectangular trenches on a multi-mode interferometer. Depending on the selected input port, the TE0 mode is converted to the eigenmodes of the bus waveguide. These modes are coupled to each other owing to the refractive-index perturbation induced by the shallow trenches and finally converted to a selected spatial mode at the output. A three-mode multiplexing device is experimentally demonstrated with a footprint of 2.00 × 17.05 µm2. The bandwidths for the three channels are >70 nm with crosstalk values below -10 dB.