Straight and S-bend rib waveguide structures with a novel design have been fabricated and characterized on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. For a typical straight rib waveguide, the single-mode waveguide at $\lambda \sim 1550\mathrm{nm}$ has been verified by measuring the near-field output with an IR camera, and a nearly polarization-independent mode size is found to be $\sim 10\mathrm{\mu m}\times 4.5\mathrm{\mu m}$ . The waveguide loss has been estimated from low-finesse Fabry–Perot transmission characteristics, and a typical value of $\sim 0.5\mathrm{dB}/\mathrm{cm}$ is obtained. It is also shown experimentally that the bending radius of an asymmetrically etched S-bend waveguide can be ten times smaller than that of conventional symmetrically etched S-bend waveguides for similar optical losses. These bend waveguides (bending radii of $\sim 1500\mathrm{\mu m}$ ) are found to be low loss ( $<2.5\mathrm{dB}$ ) and nearly polarization independent.