Directional couplers are widely used as one of the key components of optical integrated circuits. However, the coupling efficiency of the conventional directional coupler is highly sensitive to wavelength. This sensitivity degrades the characteristics of devices that contain directional couplers for wavelength division multiplexing transmission. A curved directional coupler has been proposed using silica optical waveguide as one of the coupler which realize wavelength insensitive, small footprint and tolerant to fabrication. In this paper, we theoretically investigated this curved coupler using Si wire waveguide and got results that the curved coupler whose bending radius of 21 μm and coupling length of 7.40 μm can reduce the wavelength dependence and achieve about a sevenfold enhancement of operational bandwidth in the transmittance variation range of −3 ± 0.1 dB compared with conventional directional coupler.

Oxidation by the UV & ozone process, nitridation by the nitrogen helicon-wave-excited plasma process, and the combination of these processes are applied to (100) GaAs wafers. An atomic force microscope, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, a transmission electron microscope, photoluminescence and electrical characteristics (current-voltage and capacitance-voltage) were used to analyze the influences of these processes on the structure and composition of the surfaces and the interfaces. Metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) diodes and Schottky diodes were fabricated in order to investigate the electrical influences of these processes. The oxidation slightly disorders GaAs surfaces. Nitridation of a bare surface creates about a 2nm-thick strongly disordered layer, which strongly deteriorates the electrical and photoluminescence characteristics. Nitridation of oxidated wafers (oxi-nitridation) forms firm amorphous GaON layers, which contain GaN, with very flat and sharp GaON/GaAs interfaces, where crystal disorder is hardly observed. It improves the current-voltage (I-V) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) characteristics and the photoluminescence intensity. Results of the structural and the electrical characterizations qualitatively coincide well with each other.

Abstract-We propose and demonstrate a novel linearizing method of optical frequency-sweep of a laser diode for frequencymodulated continuous-wave (FMCW) reflectometry. In order to linearly sweep the optical frequency, we adopt a reference interferometer and an electric phase comparator. The interference beat signal of the reference interferometer is phase-compared with an external reference rectangular signal having a fixed frequency near the interference beat signal frequency by a lockin amplifier. The error signal from the lock-in amplifier is fed back to the modulating signal of the injection current of the laser. Thus, a phase-locked loop composed of optical and electric circuits can be established, and the beat signal frequency is locked to the frequency of the reference signal. The optical frequency of the laser diode is, therefore, excellently linearly swept in time. In order to experimentally confirm the linearity of the proposed method, we apply this frequency-swept laser diode to the FMCW reflectometry. Resultingly, the improvement of the linearity is estimated to be about 10 dB. And the theoretically limited spatial resolution of the FMCW reflectometry is achieved. The backscattered light in optical waveguide devices is measured by the FMCW reflectometry using the proposed light source, and the propagation loss of a single-mode glass waveguide is successfully evaluated.

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