Calculation of effective index for different dielectric waveguides structures made of PVCi/PMATRIFE polymers at telecom-wavelength $$\lambda =1.55\,\upmu $$ λ = 1.55 μ m

Abstract

In this paper, a number of polymeric waveguide structures have been analyzed by using two distinct techniques which are: effective index method (EIM) and numerical simulation based on finite difference method (FDM). The main aim of this investigation is the calculation of effective indexes (EI) of the following structures: rib, ridge and buried channel waveguides at telecom wavelength $$\lambda =1.55\,\upmu \hbox {m}$$ for different dimensions of waveguide cores varying from 1.5–4 $$\upmu \hbox {m}$$ . Moreover, other optical propagation characteristics such as: confinement factor, normalized and propagation constant have been studied in TE polarisation. Otherwise the effect of the structure parameters and dimensions on the dispersion characteristics has been investigated. On the other hand, the optical field distribution has been computed using commercial software named OlympIOs. The polymers applied in the design of waveguide structures are the PVCi (n = 1,562 $$\lambda = {1.55}\,\upmu $$ m) used as core layer and the PMATRIFE (n = 1,409 $$\lambda = 1.55\,\upmu $$ m) used as substrate or cladding layer. The results obtained using EIM and simulation based on FDM show that effective index and field confinement factor of TE fundamental mode increase monotonously with the increasing dimension of core. The obtained results are in good agreement with published data based on other numerical methods.