Design of novel power splitters by directional coupling between photonic crystal waveguides

The design of a novel photonic crystal waveguide power splitter is presented. The proposed power splitter has three output ports, the coupling among three parallel photonic crystal waveguides can be considered as a multimode interference (MMI), and the positions of output waveguides are determined by those of twofold images which are formed by the self-imaging effect of multimode interference. The transmission characteristics of the splitter are investigated by using the finite-difference time domain (FDTD) and the plane wave expansion method. The output optical power in each port can be controlled by adjusting the radius of the dielectric rods in the coupling region, and the coupling effect among output ports is decreased by using the T-shaped output port. The results indicate that 1× 1, 1×2 and 1×3 type power splitters can be realized when the normalized radius of dielectric rods in the coupling region is 0.130, 0.180, 0.152 or 0.221, respectively. © 2010 Tianjin University of Technology and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.