Polarization insensitive Ge-rich silicon germanium waveguides for optical interconnects on silicon

We propose germanium-rich silicon germanium waveguides as a basic building block for polarization insensitive circuitry on silicon. In this work a detailed study of SiGe waveguides geometries is performed to find optimal parameters to simultaneously obtain low polarization sensitivity and single mode operation at lambda=1.55 mu m. The polarization dependence of the effective index, group index and dispersion coefficient is investigated. Optimized geometries are tolerant to fabrication errors and can be realized with the current state of the art CMOS technology. As a next step polarization insensitive multimode interference structures have been designed.