Modeling and characterization of guided wave optical sensor devices

Abstract

Guided wave optical sensors have had a major impact upon measurement and instrumentation, and are composed of a considerable variety of both active and passive optoelectronic components. In their design and characterization, a wide range of photonic guided-wave devices may be modeled by using several rigorous numerical approaches based on the finite element method (FEM). A review on the applications of one such numerical approach, a combination of the FEM and the least squares boundary residual method is presented. Rigorous analysis a number of photonic devices, which may incorporates several butt- coupled uniform waveguide sections, such as optical modulators, switches, filters, polarizers, power splitters, optical bends, and Bragg gratings, is demonstrated in this paper, as a basis for current and future sensors systems.