Design optimization of polymer electrooptic modulators

A versatile and numerically efficient finite-element method-based approach has been developed and used to solve the associated quasi-static Laplace equation for electrodes, the full-vectorial wave equation for optical waveguides, and the evolutionary beam-propagation method for bend designs, to characterize the Mach-Zehnder-based polymer modulators incorporating ridge-type waveguide structures. The effects of the rib height and the waveguide width on a single-mode operation, the symmetry of the beam profile, the insertion loss, and the bending loss of the polymer rib waveguides are presented. Further, the effect of the rib height, the waveguide width, and the electrode width on the key modulator parameters, such as V
_pi
L, N
_m
, and Z
_c
are presented, and as a consequence, an optimized design is reported.