Full 3D electromagnetic wave analysis using 2D simulation

A promising technique that reduce significantly the simulation time of 3D finite difference time domain (FDTD) electromagnetic (EM) simulation is proposed. The technique uses the well-known effective index method (EIM) to reduce the 2D index profile waveguide to an equivalent 1D slab waveguide which then can be simulated significantly faster using 2D FDTD simulation. We examined our technique by simulating ring resonator using standard silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguide. The 2D FDTD simulation results show very good agreement compared with the 3D FDTD simulation.