Abstract

The evaluation of the effect of discontinuities, typically junctions, tapers, or bends, in dielectric waveguides is important in the design of many integrated-optical devices. The planar nature of the waveguides used in many of these devices means that a good approximation to the discontinuity characteristics can be obtained by modeling an equivalent planar waveguide that is obtained by applying the effective index method¹ to the three-dimensional waveguide. A similar approximation is used when the beam-propagation method² is applied to these type problems.

© 1990 Optical Society of America