Design of Photonic Crystal Splitters/Combiners

摘要

Photonic band gap (PBG) structures or photonic crystals have attracted a lot of interest since one of their promising applications is to build compact photonic integrated circuits (PIC). One of key components in PICs is a 1 x 2 optical power splitter or a 2 x 1 combiner. Design of 1 x 2 optical power splitters based on photonic crystal has been investigated by several research groups, but no attention has been paid to the design of 2 x 1 optical combiners. In conventional dielectric waveguide based circuits, optical combiners are obtained just by operating the splitters in the opposite direction and the isolation between two input ports in the combiners is naturally achieved. In photonic crystal based circuits, however, we have found that reciprocal operation of the splitters as combiners will not provide proper isolation between the input ports of the combiners. In this work, microwave-circuit concept has been adopted to obtain isolation between two input ports of the combiner and compact optical power splitters/combiners of good performance have been designed using 2-D photonic crystal. Numerical analysis of the designed splitters/combiners has been performed with the finite-difference time-domain method. The designed splitters/combiners show good isolation between input ports in combiner operation with small return losses.