• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.47-52
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• 2013

A novel architecture to reduce dramatically the coupling length of multimode interference-based couplers (MMICs) is proposed by replacing conventionally designed MMICs by cascaded two-section plasmonic stepped MMICs (PS-MMIC). For the 60% cross power splitting ratio in a stepped-width MMIC, the coupling length of device results in around 42% length reduction. Furthermore, the power splitting ratio and coupling length of plasmonic MMIC just vary around 1~2% along the variation of refractive index. On the contrast, those factors for the variation of MMIC's width strongly vary around 30~40%.