Highly-efficient fiber-to-chip edge coupler for silicon carbide photonic integrated circuits

Silicon carbide (SiC) platform for integrated photonic circuits shows great promise due to its wide bandgap, low thermo-optic coefficient, and high thermal conductivity highlight. This paper presents a bilayer inversely tapered mode converter edge coupler on the cubic SiC-on-insulator platform. It effectively reduces fiber-to-chip coupling loss to below 0.5 dB across the full C and L bands, with high fabrication tolerances, enabling efficient interfacing between fibers and SiC photonic chips.