New Criterion for Designing Silica Multimode Interference Power Splitters

We introduce a new criterion for designing 1 × N silica multimode interference power splitters using overlapping-image multimode interference analysis. This criterion requires that widths of multimode waveguides in the devices should be greater than 2 times the product of port number N and effective widths of output waveguides. Better device uniformity can be achieved when the new criterion is satisfied.

Keywords:

• multimode interference couplers
• optical waveguides
• photonic integrated circuits