Abstract

Modeling and simulation are essential to the development of integrated optical guided- wave devices. In principle, the problems can be described precisely by Maxwell equations with given boundary conditions and constitutive relations that are connected with other physical aspects. These equations may be solved by various existing techniques in electromagnetics and other branches of physics. In practice, however, the extremely high ratio of device length and optical wavelength makes many well-established methods in other areas such as microwaves not feasible or effective. Despite constant effort in adapting and applying various sophisticated analytical and numerical methods to guided-wave optics in the past two decades, the most popular approaches in the field are still the effective index method (EIM) W, the coupled-mode theory (CMT) ^[2], and the beam propagation method (BPM)^[3].

© 1994 Optical Society of America