Effects of shaded facets on the performance of metal-coated etched diffraction grating demultiplexer

A finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method combined with a periodic boundary condition is used to analyze the diffraction efficiency of an etched diffraction grating (EDG) demultiplexer coated with a metallic film at the backside. The numerical results show that the diffraction loss is mainly due to the scattering effect of shaded facets of a metal-coated grating at both the polarizations. However, the same shaded facets can produce a higher loss for a TM polarization than that for a TE polarization, which induces a higher polarization dependent loss (PDL) of the demultiplexer.