Fast full-wave analysis of large-scale three-dimensional photonic crystal devices

A fast full-wave technique based on a nonoverlapping domain decomposition implementation of the finite-element method is developed for the simulation of large-scale three-dimensional (3D) photonic crystal devices modeled with millions of unknowns. The technique is highly efficient because it fully exploits the geometrical redundancy found in photonic crystal problems. It solves for the electric field everywhere in the problem domain using higher-order vector basis functions that accurately model the property of the electric field. As a 3D full-wave technique, the proposed method can easily take into account the effect of radiation loss on the device parameters such as quality factor, transmission, and reflection coefficients. The numerical results of various photonic crystal devices are presented to demonstrate the application, efficiency, and capability of this method.