Modlling of optical tapers for high-angular-tolerance optical receivers application

The performance of optical tapers used in an optical receiver for atmospheric communication applications is analyzed numerically. A generalized mathematical ray-tracing model and a computation algorithm are presented for numerical evaluations. With this model, the taper can have an arbitrary shape and both the meridional rays and skew rays can be simulated. Furthermore, a simple figure of merit is proposed for evaluating the coupling efficiency of the optical tapers.