Design and fabrication of a sub-3 dB grating coupler on an X-cut thin-film lithium niobate platform

Thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) based integrated photonic devices have been intensively investigated due to their promising properties, enabling various on-chip applications. Grating couplers (GCs) are wildly used for their flexibility and high alignment tolerance for fiber-to-chip coupling. However, achieving high coupling efficiency (CE) in TFLN GCs often requires the use of reflectors, hybrid materials, or extremely narrow linewidths of the grating arrays, which significantly increases the fabrication difficulty. Therefore, there is a demand for high-CE GCs on TFLN with simple structure and easy fabrication processes. In this paper, combining process capabilities, we demonstrate a highly efficient apodized GC by linearly optimizing the period length and the fill factor on a 600-nm-thick TFLN platform. Without any reflector or hybrid material, we achieve a remarkable coupling loss of -2.97 dB at 1555 nm on the 600-nm-thick X-cut TFLN platform with only a single lithography and etching step. Our work sets a new benchmark for CE among GCs on the 600-nm-thick TFLN platform.