Buried-Oxide Silicon-on-Insulator Structures I: Optical Waveguide Characteristics

Buried-oxide silicon-on-insulator structures are analyzed using both a multilayer transfer matrix approach and a simple approximate method. Results show that these structures can support low-loss leaky modes with substrate leakage losses under 1 dB/cm. Even for a reasonably thick silicon film layer, adjacent modes of the same polarization can have loss discriminations as large as 100 dB/cm. Mode effective indexes obtained from experimental grating transmission measurements taken on waveguides fabricated with the SIMOX process agree with the theoretical analysis. © 1992 IEEE