Design of an integrated multi-arm power splitter using photonic crystal waveguide

This paper proposes a novel design of an integrated multi-arm power splitter based on photonic crystal waveguides. A 1 × 5 power splitter is proposed by introducing line defects to form a one input waveguide arm and five output waveguide arms. The plane wave expansion method (PWE) is used to investigate the dispersion characteristics of the light coupling between the guided modes in the photonic band gap (PBG) from 0.037 ω/2πc to 0.095 ω/2πc frequency range. Using Finite-Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method, we calculated the power splitting across each output arm; 52.2% in arm C, 16.9% in arm D, 14.6% in arm E, 12.1% in arm A and 3.4% in arm B. The total observed transmission efficiency of the splitter is 99.2%. Further, the time response of electric field along the Y direction (Ey) which is perpendicular to the X-Z plane is studied. The output arms C, E, D and B show beam shaped envelope response while the remaining output arm A exhibit negligible variation with time. The compact and low cost proposed design contributes to the state of art progress in the field of photonics integrated circuits (PICs) technology where the power splitter plays a prominent role of splitting optical power between all the optical elements integrated in the chip.