Design and automated testing of foundry-based high-contrast photonic integrated circuit distributed Bragg reflectors

Abstract This paper addresses the design challenges encountered when designing high index contrast distributed Bragg reflectors (DBR) using photonic integrated circuit (PIC) foundries. We use two example foundries, each with different lithography processes, one Deep-UltraViolet and one Electron-Beam to highlight important design considerations. We study two typical types of PIC DBR: width-varying and height-varying and compare and contrast their performances, first in numerical simulation, then in automated measurement of devices for both foundry types. We show the dependency of important design parameters such as the period, fill-factor and Δn_eff in practical devices and discuss the fabrication-based issues that arise.