Analysis of CMOS Compatible Cu-Based TM-Pass Optical Polarizer

A transverse-magnetic-pass (TM-pass) optical polarizer based on Cu complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology platform is proposed and analyzed using the 2-D method-of-lines numerical model. In designing the optimum configuration for the polarizer, it was found that the metal-insulator-metal (MIM) polarizer structure is superior compared to the insulator-metal-insulator polarizer structure due to its higher polarization extinction ratio (PER) and low insertion loss. An optimized MIM TM-pass polarizer exhibits simulated long wavelength pass filter characteristics of >similar to 1.2 mu m, with fundamental TM0 and TE0 mode transmissivity of >70% and <5%, respectively, and with PER similar to 11.5 dB in the wavelength range of 1.2-1.6 mu m. The subwavelength and submicrometer features of this TM-polarizer are potentially suitable for compact and low power photonics integrated circuit implementation on silicon-based substrates.