An improved compact 2D fullwave FDFD method for general guided wave structures

Recently a finite-difference frequency-domain (FDFD) formulation has been reported for the dispersion analysis of uniform waveguides loaded with anisotropic dielectrics characterized by a diagonal tensor [4]. This formulation, which leads to an eigenvalue problem for the propagation constant gamma, involves four field components. This paper shows that this formulation can be improved by taking advantage of the fact that the structures considered are strictly bidirectional waveguides and thus the dispersion analysis problem can be formulated as an eigenvalue problem for gamma(2), involving only two field components. This improved formulation is applied to several waveguiding structures and a comparison of the results with those obtained by the commercial simulator Agilent-HFSS 5.6 show good agreement. (C) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.