Ductile Dicing for Optical Facets and Waveguides in Silicon Nitride

Silicon nitride boasts high refractive index and optical transparency from around 250nm up to 7um, enabling low-loss planar-integrated devices spanning the UV to the mid-infrared. As a platform, silicon nitride benefits from wafer-scale fabrication, CMOS compatible processes, and can be tailored for different applications during fabrication, including nonlinear applications [1], [2]. However, as with many integrated photonic platforms, it can be challenging to process facets for end coupling, where grating couplers can not be used. Traditional polishing is not only time consuming and challenging to produce precisely placed facets, but chipping and delamination of the waveguide layers result in poor yields.