Abstract

Compact, low-cost photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have long been a desire of systems engineers. The majority of PICs today use costly regrown buried heterostructure waveguides to achieve low crosstalk at reasonable packing density'. The low-cost alternative is to use etched-rib, or strip-loaded, waveguides which are simple to manufacture but may have guided slab-modes carrying unwanted light between devices within the PIC resulting in high crosstalk or low device density. Furthermore, some devices such as Mach-Zehnder interferometers and waveguide power combiners generate radiation into slab modes as a fundamental means of operation.

© 1994 Optical Society of America