Design of a tunable metal–insulator-metal power splitter and wavelength demultiplexer for optical interconnect networks.

In this paper, we have investigated a tunable and high transmission efficiency plasmonic power splitter and also a wavelength demultiplexer based on metal–insulator-metal surface. By using Finite Difference Time Domain method, the power splitter exhibits high transmission peaks of about 45% in each output port. Additionally, the simulation results demonstrate that the equal transmitted wavelengths of the two output ports can be easily tuned by changing the geometric parameters of the waveguide. Subsequently, the structure was amended to become a demultiplexer with selecting wavelengths of 1272 and 912 nm, and transmission efficiencies of 76.44 and 88.03%, respectively. Following that, the dependence of demultiplexing wavelengths on geometrical parameters of the structure is investigated. Besides being highly compact and efficient, having narrow-band spectra and low reflectance coefficient are the other main advantages of these devices. The compact power splitter presented in this study is one of the critical components of an integrated processor and hence can be of great interest in a wide range of applications, from highly integrated photonic circuits to on-chip optoelectronic modules and other optical devices such as erbium-doped fiber amplifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]