Patent 6973232 was granted and assigned to Bookham Technology on December, 2005 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Through the introduction of an imaging multimode interference device in an integrated optical circuit, such performance degradations as lateral waveguide field oscillations and backreflections may be suppressed. The suppression of lateral waveguide field oscillations (that may occur due to misaligned optical coupling), in particular, can significantly reduce variations in the power splitting ratio of an optical power splitting structure, such as those employed by a Mach-Zehnder modulator.