Laser annealing of SiO₂ film deposited by ICPECVD for fabrication of silicon based low loss waveguide

Abstract

Laser annealing of silicon dioxide (SiO₂) film formed by inductively coupled plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (ICPECVD) is studied for the fabrication of low loss silicon based waveguide. The influence of laser annealing on ICPECVD-deposited SiO₂ film is investigated. The surface roughness, refractive index, and etch rate of annealed samples are compared with those of SiO₂ film obtained by thermal oxidation. It is demonstrated that the performance of ICPECVD-deposited SiO₂ film can be significantly improved by laser annealing. Al₂O₃/SiO₂ waveguide has been fabricated on silicon substrate with the SiO₂ lower cladding formed by ICPECVD and laser annealing process, and its propagation loss is found to be comparable with that of the waveguide with thermally oxidized lower cladding.

Keywords

laser annealing / waveguide loss / silicon dioxide / inductively coupled plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (ICPECVD)

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Nos. 2012CB315605 and 2014CB340002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61210014, 61321004, 61307024, 61574082 and 51561165012), the High Technology Research and Development Program of China (No. 2015AA017101), the Independent Research Program of Tsinghua University (No. 20131089364) and the Open Fund of State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics (Nos. IOSKL2012KF08 and IOSKL2014KF09).

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg