Silicon based 2D Photonic Crystal Power Splitter for Optical Network

Silicon based Photonic Crystal (PhC) has attracted a lot of research interest in telecommunication network due to miniaturization, speed of operation and long life. In this paper, a 1×2 photonic based power splitter for TE polarized light has been designed and analyzed. The structure consists of hexagonal lattice of Silicon rods in air background with radius 0.2μm and lattice constant 0.7μm. The Simulation is performed for 1550nm. Plane Wave Expansion (PWE) method is used to analyze the Photonic Band Gap and the device performance is evaluated using Finite Difference Time Domain(FDTD) method. Further, the device has been optimized to improve performance. The splitting ratio is enhanced using bi-periodicity of silicon rods in the Y junction. The device offers a splitting ratio of 0.5 which can be used for free space optics.