Analysis of optical directional couplers in thin glass sheets for PCB integration

Bidirectional optical transmission on one single waveguide saves space on the board level. Firstly, we propose an analytic model of the manufacturing process for our specific application, as numerical solutions lead to a huge demand of memory, which limits the modelling and analysis. Secondly, we describe a directional coupler, which separates received and transmitted signals and analyse it with ray tracing method, to find out important parameters, influencing the coupling efficiency. In a last step, we describe possibilities to improve the couplers properties by an analysis of the branching area.