  This study reports on the design of small footprint, integrated polarization
filters based on engineered photonic lattices. Using a rods-in-air lattice as a
basis for a TE filter and a holes-in-slab lattice for the analogous TM filter,
we are able to maximize the degree of polarization of the output beams up to 98
% with a transmission efficiency greater than 75 %. The proposed designs allow
not only for logical polarization filtering, but can also be tailored to output
an arbitrary transverse beam profile. The lattice configurations are found
using a recently proposed parallel tabu search algorithm for combinatorial
optimization problems in integrated photonics.
