Abstract

We have fabricated a series of S-bends in MBE-grown epilayers on (100) n⁺ GaAs substrates. The epilayer structure is a 1.1µm thick GaAs guiding layer above a 3.0µm Al_.16Ga_.84As cladding layer. The 2.3µm wide rib waveguides are reactive ion etched to a depth of 0.85µm into the guiding layer. The centers of our rib waveguide S-bends follow the equation x(z) = h{z/L − sin(27πz/L)/2π} with h = 10µm and 25µm ≤ L ≤ 400µm. The optical loss was determined experimentally to within ±0.1dB by measuring the Fabry-Perot fringe contrast of the cleaved waveguide sample with TE polarized light from a temperature tuned λ ≈ 1.3µm semiconductor diode laser.

© 1989 Optical Society of America