New Design of Y-Junction Coupler Based on Highly Multimode Polymer Waveguide

A In this paper, we demonstrate a new design of a highly multimode Y-junction optical waveguide coupler with a v-shaped tip compared to a standard design for better optical power splitter/combiner. The acrylic-based waveguide contains of 1 mm x 1 mm waveguide cross section, attached by 98/1000 mu m polymer optical fiber (POF) as an input and outputs and NOA63 transparent adhesive polymer at the middle Y-junction region. In the simulation of the new design, the Y-junction branching angles and POF v-shaped tip angles were varied. The transmission analysis was conducted using non-sequential ray tracing technique due to the highly multimode nature of the waveguide. The output power from the two ports obtained from the simulations was about 94% with an average of 47% power splitting and percentage difference of plus or minus 0.1% between each output ports. The new design shows better splitting ratio with higher power output and maintain the excess loss of 0.27 dB.