Foundry-Fabricated Silicon Nitride Grating Arrays with Uniform Power Distribution at Visible Wavelengths
Abstract
Multiplexed optical biosensors are widely deployed to read out many biological targets in parallel. However, their channel count and integration density are limited by the photonic network that delivers light to individual sensing sites. Existing on-chip networks have been largely developed for phased arrays and image projection, where performance is assessed through an aggregate radiation pattern rather than the local intensity at each output. In this Letter, we demonstrate a novel bus-and-tap network architecture for massively parallel multiplexed optical delivery. The network uses cascaded directional couplers with individually designed interaction lengths, allowing for arbitrary, user-defined illumination patterns not possible with conventional binary tree architectures. We experimentally validated our proposed architecture with 46 visible-wavelength grating emitter channels designed for uniform illumination at 40 μm pitch in a commercial 300-mm silicon nitride foundry process, achieving an emitted-intensity coefficient of variation of 9.3% at 530 nm, and 8.8% under band-integrated illumination from 550 nm to 650 nm. These results provide a route to scalable visible-light delivery for sensing, imaging, neural interfaces, and parallel optical addressing in quantum systems.
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BibTeX
@misc{alquliah2026foundryfabricated,
title = {{Foundry-Fabricated Silicon Nitride Grating Arrays with Uniform Power Distribution at Visible Wavelengths}},
author = {Amged Alquliah and Xiaoxin Wang and Jifeng Liu and Anthony Rizzo},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.30387},
eprint = {2610.30387},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30387},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Foundry-Fabricated Silicon Nitride Grating Arrays with Uniform Power Distribution at Visible Wavelengths
AU - Amged Alquliah
AU - Xiaoxin Wang
AU - Jifeng Liu
AU - Anthony Rizzo
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/21
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.30387
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30387
AB - Multiplexed optical biosensors are widely deployed to read out many biological targets in parallel. However, their channel count and integration density are limited by the photonic network that delivers light to individual sensing sites. Existing on-chip networks have been largely developed for phased arrays and image projection, where performance is assessed through an aggregate radiation pattern rather than the local intensity at each output. In this Letter, we demonstrate a novel bus-and-tap network architecture for massively parallel multiplexed optical delivery. The network uses cascaded directional couplers with individually designed interaction lengths, allowing for arbitrary, user-defined illumination patterns not possible with conventional binary tree architectures. We experimentally validated our proposed architecture with 46 visible-wavelength grating emitter channels designed for uniform illumination at 40 μm pitch in a commercial 300-mm silicon nitride foundry process, achieving an emitted-intensity coefficient of variation of 9.3% at 530 nm, and 8.8% under band-integrated illumination from 550 nm to 650 nm. These results provide a route to scalable visible-light delivery for sensing, imaging, neural interfaces, and parallel optical addressing in quantum systems.
ER -