Analysis of piezoelectric strip waveguides based on the effective index and pseudospectral element methods

Integrated acousto-optical circuits in LiNbO3 are attractive devices for applications especially in advanced WDM systems. In order to increase the scale of integration and to reduce the RF driving power of these devices, one promising approach is to use acoustical waveguides with smaller lateral dimensions. In this paper the combination of a pseudospectral elements method (PSEM) and an effective index method (EIM) for the analysis of film-loaded surface acoustic waveguides (SAWG's) is presented. Numerical results demonstrate the exponential rate of convergence of the PSEM and agree with the computations performed via the transverse resonance technique. Due to the exponential rate of convergence of the PSEM and to a mapping transformation in the substrate, the piezoelectric problem in the depth direction of the structures is evaluated by a low number of Legendre polynomials. The method is applied to the analysis of several layered SAWG's of practical interest for AO devices, such as metal/SiO2/X - YLiNbO3, in which the metal is either Au, Al, In, or Ti.