Weighted-index beam-propagation method for analysis of three-dimensional optical structures

The three-dimensional beam propagation method (3DBPM) is very slow and requires a huge amount of computer memory. A new beam-propagation technique for the analysis of three-dimensional integrated optical structures is presented. This technique depends on the use of the weighted-index method to transform the three-dimensional BPM into two coupled two-dimensional BPM techniques. Numerical results show good agreement with the standard 3DBPM while both the computational time and the memory required are greatly reduced