(180ab) Modeling of Polymer-Based Periodic Optical Waveguides

To assist the precision and stability of light transmission, built-in corrugated gratings with nanometer period are integrated into periodic optical waveguides. Such waveguides can consume less power and generate less heat than the electric interconnects. Optical interconnects can be considered as an alternative way of transmitting data or signal. Since silicon is cheap and transparent at certain wavelength, silicon can serve as the waveguide material. PMMA has the properties of transparency, good adhesion with silicon, and lower refractive index. Consequently, PMMA can serve as the cladding layers for the silicon layer. The corrugated metal layer, next to the PMMA layer, not only can stabilize the wavelength but can affect the optical mode interactions.

This work constructs a multi-parametric optical waveguide model to compute the mode-coupling coefficients in the PMMA-based devices. For such a hybrid material device, the photonic method and the optical method are utilized to compute coupling coefficients. A visualized numerical method is demonstrated to help solve the complex model. Both methods have close numerical values.

Numerical results demonstrate how the corrugation amplitudes and geometries of gratings can affect the coupling coefficients. Further physical interpretation and discussion can support and explain the above results. The modeling results can help engineers decide the values of parameters used in the design, fabrication, and application of optical waveguides.