Optical interconnections with photonic crystal self-collimation, directional emission and co-directional coupling mechanism

Abstract

To combine the advantages of self-collimation, directional emission and co-directional coupling, a structure consisting of a self-collimation region, a coupler, a coupling section and two arbitrarily bent periodic dielectric waveguides is designed and analysed theoretically for optical interconnections. The light from the self-collimation region can be injected into the coupling section and transferred efficiently into the arbitrarily bent output branches if phase matching conditions are satisfied. By using the surface modification method, even when the Gaussian light source is placed far away from the self-collimation region, the desired directional emission effect can still be obtained. The performances of the proposed structure are evaluated by finite-difference time-domain simulations.