Multimode power divider using radiation from tight bending waveguide

By using a large-core and high-/spl Delta/ polymeric optical waveguide, we developed the mode-division power divider which enables wide-angle power dividing, and compared it with a conventional Y-junction power divider. The core size and /spl Delta/ were 100/spl times/100 /spl mu/m/sup 2/ and 5.4%, respectively. At the conditions of 25/spl deg/ branching angle and 50/50 splitting ratio, the excess loss of the mode-division and Y-junction were estimated to be 2.5 and 9.5 dB, respectively. These values were including 1.2 dB fiber-connecting loss. Furthermore, we observed that both the mode-division type outputs have almost the same modal power distribution as the input.