JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO.

12, JUNE 15, 2009

2077

Finite-Difference Modeling of Dielectric Waveguides

With Corners and Slanted Facets
Yih-Peng Chiou, Member, IEEE, Yen-Chung Chiang, Member, IEEE, Chih-Hsien Lai, Cheng-Han Du, and
Hung-Chun Chang, Senior Member, IEEE, Member, OSA

AbstractWith the help of an improved finite-difference (FD)

formulation, we investigate the field behaviors near the corners of
simple dielectric waveguides and the propagation characteristics of
a slant-faceted polarization converter. The formulation is full-vectorial, and it takes into consideration discontinuities of fields and
their derivatives across the abrupt interfaces. Hence, the limitations in conventional FD formulation are alleviated. In the first
investigation, each corner is replaced with a tiny arc rather than
a really sharp wedge, and nonuniform grids are adopted. Singularity-like behavior of the electric fields emerge as the arc becomes
smaller without specific treatment such as quasi-static approximation. Convergent results are obtained in the numerical analysis
as compared with results from the finite-element method. In the
second investigation, field behaviors across the slanted facet are
incorporated in the formulation, and hence the staircase approximation in conventional FD formulation is removed to get better
modeling of the full-vectorial properties.
Index TermsCorners, dielectric waveguides, finite-difference
method (FDM), frequency-domain analysis, full-vectorial, singularities, step index, tiny arcs.

I. INTRODUCTION

MONG various structures for optical applications, the

structures containing corners are almost inevitable and
singularities of fields at corners are known as manifestations
of the vector nature of electromagnetic waves ([1], and references therein). Because of the simplicity of implement and
sparsity of the resultant matrix, the finite-difference method
(FDM) is an attractive numerical method to analyze the optical
waveguides. Although some improved finite-difference (FD)
schemes [2][4] have been proposed for full-vectorial modal
analysis, precise modeling of field singularities near the corners
with full-vectorial modal analysis is still very difficult [5].

Manuscript received June 11, 2008; revised August 29, 2008. First published
April 17, 2009; current version published June 24, 2009. This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Education, Taipei, Taiwan, under the ATU plan,
by the National Science Council of the Republic of China under Grant NSC952221-E-005-127 and Grant NSC97-2221-E-005-091-MY2, and by the Excellent Research Projects of National Taiwan University under Grant 97R0062-07.
Y.-P. Chiou is with the Graduate Institute of Photonics and Optoelectronics
and Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei
106-17, Taiwan (e-mail: ypchiou@ntu.edu.tw).
Y.-C. Chiang is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung 402-27, Taiwan (e-mail: ycchiang1970@nchu.edu.tw; pgkng@yahoo.com.tw).
C.-H. Lai and C.-H. Du are with the Graduate Institute of Photonics and
Optoelectronics, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106-17, Taiwan (e-mail:
d93941025@ntu.edu.tw; b92006@csie.ntu.edu.tw).
H.-C. Chang is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, the Graduate
Institute of Photonics and Optoelectronics, and the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 106-17, Taiwan
(e-mail: hcchang@cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2008.2006862

Fig. 1. Cross-sectional view of a square channel waveguide with the rotated

coordinate setup at the corner.

Since the field singularity is highly localized in nature, most

analysis methods focus on the behavior of fields very close to
the corner. Within the vicinity of the corner, the spatial variations of the field is far more rapid than the temporal variations,
and the electromagnetic field near a corner can be considered
quasi-static [1]. In such cases, the field may be expanded as
the powers of the distance from the corner [6], [7], i.e., in
Fig. 1 or more correctly with additional logarithmic terms [8].
Hadley [9] and Thomas et al. [10] utilized such expansion
method in their derivation of improved FD scheme regarding
the field near the corner. Such treatments mostly focus on the
variation of the fields in the radial direction, but they cannot
properly model the behavior of fields in the rotational direction, which is denoted as the variable , as shown in Fig. 1. We
also noticed that these formulations are mostly based on the
magnetic fields, which are continuous at corners and experience less singular difficulties in their field behaviors, and thus
obtaining a proper formulation for electric fields is still not
easy due to the singularities. Lui et al. [11] derived a simple
formula by expanding the E as the power of , but this formula is not a thorough derivation as indicated by Hadley [9].
Besides, the applications of the above-mentioned improved formulations are limited to those structures with interfaces parallel
to - or -axis. Finite-element method (FEM) is a choice for
such structures, since it can generally fit the structure better.
However, it still needs special treatment for the corner cases.
Efficient finite-element modal solvers with full-vectorial properties [12], [13] were proposed for the corner problems, but the
mesh generation and the programming are relatively tedious.
Another limitation of conventional FDM is that grids in the
computation are normally parallel to the axes in the discretization of field components. Staircase approximation is often required when the fields cross a slanted interface between two
different materials. The convergence is slow due to the staircase
approximation as compared to other methods without staircase
approximation, e.g., FEM. In addition, the full-vectorial properties may not be accurately modeled under such approximation.

0733-8724/$25.00 2009 IEEE

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Fig. 2. (a) Cross-sectional view of the stencil used near the corner.

In our previous paper [14], we proposed an improved

full-vectorial FD scheme regarding dielectric waveguides with
piecewise homogeneous structures. In this paper, we will adopt
the scheme with nonuniform grids to demonstrate the singularity-like behaviors of the electric fields here even without any
field expansion by powers of radius (or additional logarithmic
terms). In addition, our method will show that it can be easily
extended to those structures with slanted facets. Implementation will be described in Section II, and some numerical
results are given in Section III. A simple conclusion is drawn
in Section IV.
II. FORMULATION
In this section, we will first introduce our full-vectorial FD
scheme for structures with step-index interfaces. The interface
can be slanted to the - and -axes or even curved. Then, we
will give a simple treatment for modeling a corner with a small
arc.
A. Finite-Difference Schemes for Step-Index Interface
The cross section of the problem under consideration is
shown in Fig. 2(a) in which a linear slanted interface or a
curved interface lies between the grid points. The basic idea
is to express the field quantities at the surrounding grid points
and its
as the expansion of the field at the center point
derivatives. Using the surrounding point at
as an example, the derivation process of the relation for grid
points with an interface in between can be summarized as the
following steps, and these steps are basically the same as those
introduced in [14]:
as the 2-D Taylor series
1) Express the field
and
expansion of the field just right to the interface

and its
its derivatives. Similarly, we can also express
and its derivatives.
derivatives as the expansion of
and its derivatives in
2) As shown in Fig. 2(a), transform
the global coordinate system into corresponding terms
in the local rotated coordinate system for the linear
slanted interface or into the local cylindrical coordinate system for the curved interface with effective radius
. Similarly,
and its derivatives are transformed back
to their correspondings in the coordinates system.
and its derivatives as a linear combination
3) Express
and its derivaof the field just left to the interface
tives by matching the boundary conditions. In addition to
those given in [14], some detailed formulas are given in the
Appendix.
In the steps, represents the electric field or the magnetic
field , and the subscript denotes the - or -component.
as the
Following the above steps, we can express
and its derivatives. If there is no
linear combination of
interface between the grid points, such expansion and boundary
matching is the same as normal Taylor series expansion in a homogeneous material. For the second-order scheme, we need use
nine grid points and corresponding derivative terms. We collect
all relation equations based on the nine points shown in Fig. 2(a),
itself, and express them in a matrix
including the point
form:
(1)
where
is the vector of the fields
is the matrix of coeffiat the nine points,
cients derived with the above steps, and
is the
vector contains the field quantities at the point
and
its derivatives with respect to or . We can obtain a final
set of FD formulas by taking inverse operation of (1), and
,
,
the improved FD formulas for the terms
,
, and so on in
are then expressed
as a linear combination of the field values at the nine sampled
points.
Note that the interface between materials of refractive indexes
and can be slanted or curved. No staircase approximation
is required as that in common FD formulation. The boundary
conditions across the slanted or curved interface in our formulation are satisfied through coordinate transformation of the fields.
Noteworthily, the derivation process is the same for both E- and
H-formulations. For waveguides made of nonmagnetic media,
H is continuous across the interface between two media, while
E may be discontinuous. Therefore, we generally expect the
H-formulation converges faster. They do normally, but there is
slight difference between two formulations, since derivative of
H may also be discontinuous. Therefore, the singular behavior
around a corner exists for E and H formulations.
B. Treatment Near the Corner
We may adopt another strategy in the analysis of the corner
problems, since we have proposed an improved full-vectorial

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CHIOU et al.: FINITE-DIFFERENCE MODELING OF DIELECTRIC WAVEGUIDES WITH CORNERS AND SLANTED FACETS

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Fig. 3. Contours of the electric field distributions for the fundamental mode of the square channel waveguide. (a) E and (b) E .

Fig. 4. Contours of the magnetic field distributions for the fundamental mode of the square channel waveguide. (a) H and (b) H .

Fig. 5. 3-D plot of the electric field distributions for the fundamental mode of the square channel waveguide. (a) E and (b) E .

FD scheme to rigorously treat linear and curved step-index interfaces as in last section. As shown in Fig. 2(b), we model the
rather than a recorner as a tiny arc with effective radius
ally sharp wedge. In fact, this replacement may be even closer
to the realistic engineering implementations. Outside the corner
region, we adopt the linear slanted scheme to model the interface. The relation between the arc angle and the original corner
angle is
arc

corner

(2)

where corner is the angle of the corner and arc is the arc
angle used to approximate the corner, as shown in Fig. 2(b). To

enhance the calculation efficiency, we use fine uniform meshes

around the corner and nonuniform ones elsewhere. As indicated
in Fig. 2(a), the index of light-gray area was replaced from to
, thus the index distribution differs from the real corner case.
However, the limit will approach the corner case as gets more
and more smaller. After an iterative process of updating ,
,
, we will obtain a convergent result.
and
Although we do not expand the field as the powers of the
distance from the corner, i.e., in Fig. 1 or more correctly with
additional logarithmic terms as others do, we will show that our
treatment can still model the vectorial nature of the field via the
curvature in our scheme. And this will be demonstrated in the
following section.

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Fig. 6. 3-D plot of the electric field distributions for the fundamental mode of the square channel waveguide. (a)

Fig. 7. Electric field profiles along the diagonal of the waveguide near a corner obtained by using different

TABLE I
CONVERGENCE OF THE COMPUTED REFRACTIVE INDEXES OF THE
SQUARE CHANNEL WAVEGUIDE

III. NUMERICAL RESULTS

A. Channel Waveguide Case
Referring to the structure shown in Fig. 1, we first calculate
the mode fields of a square channel waveguide with width
m, the refractive indexes of the waveguide and the vacuum
and
, respectively, as shown in Fig. 1.
being
m. The
The operating wavelength is assumed to be
parameters used here are the same as those used by Sudb [5]
and Lui et al. [11]. This case can be calculated by some typical
method, e.g., Goells approach [15], but they did not treat the
corner problem well as indicated by Sudb [5]. Because of the
symmetry of the field, we only calculate one quarter of the whole
region. We also apply transparent boundary condition (TBC) in
this case and the calculation window is 1.0 m in both and
directions. We use uniform mesh divisions at the vicinity of

r . (a) E

and (b)

and (b)

the corner and nonuniform mesh divisions elsewhere to save

computation time and memory. The smallest grid size is
m near the corner, and the largest grid size is
m near the edge of the computational
window. The effective radius of the arc at the corner is chosen
to be 0.0125 m.
The contours of the computed transverse field components
,
,
, and
for the fundamental mode are shown in
Figs. 3 and 4, respectively. Figs. 5 and 6 show the 3-D surface
plots of the corresponding transverse field components in Figs. 3
and 4. Although we do not add any singularity treatment near
the corner, the resultant distributions of the electric fields still
behave singularity-like near the corner. On the other hand, the
resultant distributions of the magnetic fields behave smoothly
around the corner as expected. Figs. 7 and 8 show the field
profiles along the diagonal of the waveguide near a corner by
using different values. It can be shown that both electric field
components become more and more singularity-like as gets
smaller. However, the field profiles near the corner and the computed effective index are found to converge uniformly. On the
other hand, the H components near the corner converge faster
due to their continuity nature.
We calculate another case with the same waveguide width
and refractive indexes as those used in the above case, except
that the waveguide is operated at the normalized frequency
and the waveguide is surrounded
by a perfect electric conductor (PEC). The same structure
has been analyzed by a vector FEM with inhomogeneous
elements (VFEM-I) [13] and their converged effective indexes

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CHIOU et al.: FINITE-DIFFERENCE MODELING OF DIELECTRIC WAVEGUIDES WITH CORNERS AND SLANTED FACETS

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Fig. 8. Magnetic field profiles along the diagonal of the waveguide near a corner obtained by using different r . (a) H and (b) H .

EFFECTIVE INDEXES OF THE H

TABLE II
MODE FOR THE RIB WAVEGUIDE FOR DIFFERENT D s COMPUTED BY DIFFERENT AUTHORS

Fig. 9. Cross-sectional view of a rib waveguide.

are 1.35638307 and 1.35638381 obtained by the H-VFEM and

the E-VFEM, respectively. For further comparison, the result
by Goells approach is 1.35617. Table I lists the convergent
behavior of the computed effective refractive index in this case
by using our improved full-vectorial - and -formulations,
respectively. We can see that both the grid sizes and the effective radius of the arc at the corner influence the convergence
of the results. When the grid sizes and become smaller, the
results get more closer to those calculated using the VFEM-I
by Li and Chang [13]. It also shows that the results using the
-formulation converge faster than those using the -formulation. This is reasonable due to the more singular behavior in
the electric fields.
B. Rib Waveguide Case
Although channel waveguides can provide better field confinement, the cost of fabricating the channel waveguides is relatively higher. In this section, we illustrate the capability of
our formulations in treating the well-known rib waveguide involving the structure, as shown in Fig. 9. The slab-based structure provides the field confinement in the -direction and the rib
region provides the field confinement in the -direction because

of the relatively higher equivalent refractive index in the rib region. Since this structure is relatively easier for semiconductor
processing, it is one of the most popular structures in the design
of integrated optic devices and systems.
In our calculation, we use the following parameters: the opm, rib width
m, and
erating wavelength
m. The outer slab depth varies from 0.1 to
0.9 m. The refractive indexes of the cover, the guiding layer,
,
, and
,
and the substrate are
respectively. The parameters for the computational window are
m,
m, and
m. We present
in the last two columns of Table II the computed effective index
mode obtained by our improved of the lowest order
and -formulations. TBC is adopted. Table II also provides
values obtained by previous authors using different methods:
the VFEM with Aitken extrapolation [16], the VFEM with highorder mixed-interpolation-type elements (Edge-FEM) [17], and
VFEM-I [13]. Figs. 10 and 11 show the contours of the com,
,
, and
for
puted transverse field components
mode using our improved formulations with
the lowest
m. Note that the field confinement is not very good in
-direction for
and 0.9, and using PEC instead of TBC
may affect the sixth and fifth significant digits, respectively.
C. Rib Waveguides With One Slanted Side Wall
A typical photonic integrated system includes many components that are polarization sensitive, for example, integrated
switches, interferometers, amplifiers, receivers, etc. Thus, it is
often necessary to manipulate or convert polarization state in

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, JUNE 15, 2009

Fig. 10. Contours of the electric field distributions for the H

Fig. 11. Contours of the magnetic field distributions for the H

mode of the rib waveguide. (a) E and (b) E .

mode of the rib waveguide. (a) H and (b) H .

Fig. 12. The schematic representation of the single-section polarization converter. (a) The converter structure. (b) Cross-sectional view of the PRW section.

such guided wave structures, and polarization converters are

key components in photonic integrated systems. Polarization
rotation in optical devices can be achieved by induced material
anisotropy. Previously, such polarization converters employing
electrooptical [18] and photoelastic effects [19] had been reported. However, in many applications, a passive polarization
converter is much preferred, and some very promising and
simpler passive polarization converters have also been reported

[20][22]. Such passive components may be simpler to fabricate and an important characteristic of these converters is that
the polarization rotation is achieved simply by adjusting the
geometry of the devices. Most of these passive polarization
converters employ a longitudinally periodic perturbation structure. Recently, it has been reported that it is possible to achieve
polarization rotation in a single-section design [23][25], as
mode is launched from a standard
shown in Fig. 12(a). If an
input waveguide (IW), this incident field excites both the first
and second hybrid modes of nearly equal modal amplitudes.
As these two hybrid modes propagate along the polarization
rotating waveguide (PRW), they would become out of phase at
the half-beat length and their combined modal fields produce
mode in the following output waveguide (OW).
mainly a
The PRW is based on a rib waveguide with one side wall slanted
at an angle around 45 , and the cross-sectional view of this
structure is shown in Fig. 12(b).
The parameters we use for an asymmetrical slanted-wall rib
m, rib width
waveguide are the operating wavelength
m,
m, and the outer slab depth
m. The refractive indexes of the cover, the guiding layer,
and the substrate are
,
, and
,
respectively. The parameters for the computational window are
m,
m, and
m. The slanted angle

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CHIOU et al.: FINITE-DIFFERENCE MODELING OF DIELECTRIC WAVEGUIDES WITH CORNERS AND SLANTED FACETS

2083

Fig. 13. 3-D plot of the electric field distributions for the first hybrid mode of the asymmetric slanted-wall rib waveguide. (a) E and (b) E .

Fig. 14. 3-D plot of the magnetic field distributions for the first hybrid mode of the asymmetric slanted-wall rib waveguide. (a) H and (b) H .

Fig. 15. 3-D plot of the electric field distributions for the second hybrid mode of the asymmetric slanted-wall rib waveguide. (a) E and (b) E .

is 52 . Figs. 13 and 14 show the 3-D plots of the E and M components for the first hybrid mode, respectively. Figs. 15 and 16
show the 3-D plots of the E and M components for the second
hybrid mode, respectively. We use 317 by 251 grid meshes in
calculation. The calculated effective refractive indexes for the
first hybrid mode are 3.3273423 and 3.3272512 by using and -formulations, respectively. The calculated effective refractive indexes for the second hybrid mode are 3.3263567 and
3.3263383 by using - and -formulations, respectively. We
can see that both hybrid modes have comparable field components in - and -directions, and their polarizations are no longer
in the - or -direction but in the direction parallel or perpendicular to the slanted wall. Thus, they cannot be correctly obtained by using semivectorial formulation. To verify our simulation, FEM and Yee-mesh-based FD beam propagation method
(Yee-FD-BPM) [26] are adopted, as shown in Table III. Both
and
fields are used at the same time in the formulation
of Yee-FD-BPM. Furthermore, we also use conventional FD
scheme [2] with staircase approximation and index-average approximation to calculate the same problem. We find that the hybrid mode cannot be correctly obtained either by our codes or

by commercial software. The fundamental modes may become

- or -dominant modes, not as expected. It is shown that our
improved FD scheme can easily handle this structure with facets
that are not parallel to - or -axis.

IV. CONCLUSION
Replacing sharp wedges with tiny arcs, we have implemented
full-vectorial FD scheme to investigate the field behavior near
dielectric waveguide corners. Nonuniform grids are adopted to
save computation. The electrical fields show singularity-like
distribution due to abrupt field discontinuities around the
corner, while the magnetic fields show smooth distribution due
to field continuity. Numerical results are convergent and show
excellent approximation to the real wedge structure. Five-digit
accuracy or more is achieved as compared with the full-vectorial FEM. In addition, the formulation is applicable to slanted
facets without staircase approximation. Numerical results from
a passive polarization converter shows it can model well the
full-vectorial properties of fields.

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, JUNE 15, 2009

Fig. 16. 3-D plot of the magnetic field distributions for the second hybrid mode of the asymmetric slanted-wall rib waveguide. (a)

TABLE III
EFFECTIVE INDEXES OF COMPUTED BY DIFFERENT METHODS

and (b)

(17)
(18)
for the electric field.
For the curved interface case, the interface conditions required in addition to those in [14] are

APPENDIX
For the linear slanted interface case, the interface conditions
required in addition to those in [14] are

(19)
(20)

(3)

(21)

(4)

(22)

(5)
(6)

(23)

(7)

(24)

(8)
(9)

(25)

(10)
for the magnetic field and
(11)
(12)

(26)
for the magnetic field and

(13)

(27)

(14)

(28)

(15)
(16)

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(29)

CHIOU et al.: FINITE-DIFFERENCE MODELING OF DIELECTRIC WAVEGUIDES WITH CORNERS AND SLANTED FACETS

(30)
(31)
(32)

(33)
(34)
for the electric field.
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[25] B. M. A. Rahman, S. S. A. Obayya, N. Somasiri, M. Rajarajan, K. T. V.
Grattan, and H. A. El-Mikathi, Design and characterization of compact single-section passive polarization rotator, J. Lightw. Technol.,
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[26] J. Yamauchi, T. Mugita, and H. Nakano, Implicit Yee-mesh-based
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Yih-Peng Chiou (M03) was born in Taoyuan,
Taiwan, in 1969. He received the B.S. and Ph.D.
degrees from the National Taiwan University, Taipei,
Taiwan, in 1992 and 1998, respectively, both in
electrical engineering.
From 1999 to 2000, he was with the Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, where he
was engaged in research on the plasma enhanced
chemical vapor deposition of dielectric films. From
2001 to 2003, he was with the RSoft Design Group,
New York, where he was engaged in research on
the modeling of simulation techniques and developing of photonic computer-aided-design tools. In 2003, he joined the faculty of the Graduate Institute
of Electro-Optical Engineering (now Institute of Photonics and Electronics)
and Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, where
he is currently an Assistant Professor. His current research interests include
modeling and computer aided design (CAD) of optoelectronics, which includes
photonic crystals, nano structures, waveguide devices, optical fiber devices,
light extraction enhancement in LED, display, solar cell devices, and the
development and improvement of numerical techniques in optoelectronics.

Yen-Chung Chiang (M06) was born in Hualien,

Taiwan, on March 10, 1970. He received the B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan,
in 1992, 1994, and 2002, respectively.
From 2002 to 2005, he was with the Very Innovative Architecture (VIA) Technologies Inc., Taiwan,
where he was engaged in research on the design
of radio-frequency integrated circuits. In 2005, he
joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering
Department, National Chung-Hsing University,
Taichung, Taiwan, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. His current
research interests include the numerical analysis techniques for optical or
microwave devices and the design of radio-frequency integrated circuits.

Chih-Hsien Lai, photograph and biography not available at the time of publication.

Cheng-Han Du, photograph and biography not available at the time of publication.

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2086

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 27, NO. 12, JUNE 15, 2009

Hung-Chun Chang (S78M83SM00) was born

in Taipei, Taiwan, on February 8, 1954. He received
the B.S. degree from the National Taiwan University,
Taipei, Taiwan, in 1976, the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees
from the Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1980
and 1983, respectively, all in electrical engineering.
From 1978 to 1984, he was with the Space,
Telecommunications, and Radioscience Laboratory
of Stanford University. In August 1984, he joined the
faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering,
National Taiwan University, where he is currently
a Professor. From 1989 to 1991, he served as the Vice-Chairman of the
Department of Electrical Engineering and, from 1992 to 1998, as the Chairman
of the newly-established Graduate Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering
at the National Taiwan University. He is also with the Graduate Institute of
Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University. His current research

interests include the theory, design, and application of guided-wave structures

and devices for fiber optics, integrated optics, optoelectronics, and microwaveand millimeter-wave circuits.
Dr. Chang is a member of Sigma Xi, the Phi Tan Phi Scholastic Honor Society,
the Chinese Institute of Engineers, the Photonics Society of Chinese-Americans, the Optical Society of America, the Electromagnetics Academy, and the
China/SRS (Taipei) National Committee (a Standing Committee member during
19881993 and since 2006) of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI).
He has been serving as the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (Japan) Overseas Area Representative in Taipei. In 1987, he
was among the recipients of the Young Scientists Award at the URSI XXIInd
General Assembly. In 1993, he was one of the recipients of the Distinguished
Teaching Award sponsored by the Republic of China, Ministry of Education
and in 2004, he received the Merit National Science Council (NSC) Research
Fellow Award sponsored by the Republic of China, NSC.

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