Simplified Approach for Optimizing Optical Asymmetric Curved Waveguides of Broadband Directional Couplers

ABSTRACT Optical broadband directional couplers (BDCs) are indispensable components for providing wavelength-insensitive and flexible optical splitting in the construction of functional photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The existing BDC device structures are usually required to determine specific design parameters for different waveguide structures and operating wavelength bands. To circumvent this dilemma, here we present a novel optimization procedure to realize a compact BDC by using the asymmetric curved waveguide structure. The versatile particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is adopted to determine the optimal device parameters of the compact and broadband asymmetric curved directional couplers (ACDCs) for different coupling ratios. In order to reduce the computational complexity in the optimization, the 3D ACDC is first converted to an equivalent 2D structure by using the modified effective index method (MEIM). The device parameters of the equivalent 2D ACDC are optimized by the PSO with the objective function of a wavelength flattened coupling ratio. Afterward, the optimized 2D structure is converted to the 3D one by including the waveguide thickness. To cope with the approximation error by the MEIM, the 3D ACDC is further fine-tuned by sweeping one of the device parameters with the full 3D simulation but keeping all of the other optimal parameters obtained from the PSO intact. As a result, a DC with broad bandwidth of 100 nm is obtained over the wavelength range from 1.50 µm to 1.60 µm with a very small coupling length of 6 µm. The semi-optimized ACDC is used to construct an unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and a Sagnac loop mirror (SLM), both of which show high extinction ratios of >25 dB over a broad wavelength range with low excess loss.