Abstract

Rib waveguides have received much attention recently because of advances in III-V semiconductor technology. The simplicity of fabrication and the ease of control of lateral and vertical index profiles make rib waveguide structures attractive for integrated optical applications. Despite the progress in fabrication, the modeling and analysis of rib waveguides are difficult. The approximate analytical approach, such as in the effective-index method, is simple and efficient but may not be accurate enough for all practical cases. The rigorous numerical approach, such as in the finite-difference² (FD) and the finite-element³ (FE) methods are accurate and versatile but often are complicated and computer intensive. Therefore a simple approach that gives accurate results would be useful as a practical tool for modeling and analysis for the purpose of device design and fabrication. Such an approach has been developed by the authors' and is applied to optical rib waveguides in this paper.

© 1990 Optical Society of America