Comparison of the Design Characteristics of MMI Wavelength Demultiplexers Using Different Approaches by Computing the Effective Index

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is the key technique for high data rates communication systems. WDM systems offer many advantages for optical communications with several unique features and requirements in terms of their implementation. This is because the design characteristics and realization of WDM components are crucial and depend particularly on the type of materials used for fabrication. In this article, we investigate the design characteristics of a wavelength demultiplexer using the effective index method in order to determine the propagation constants and field distributions of fundamental modes in dielectric waveguides. In order to analyze the impact of computation method on the design characteristics of the demultiplexer, the effective index is computed by an analytic approach. To this end, we propose a new algorithm for developing an analytic model. We can confirm that design characteristics of WDM components depend on the approach chosen for computing the effective indexes.