A single-groove grating for five-port TE-polarization beam splitting under normal incidence at the wavelength of 1550 nm is presented. The transmitted diffraction efficiency of the gratings is over 94.5% with uniformity better than 2%. A physical view of diffraction inside the grating is presented by the simplified modal method (SMM). Initial parameters of the grating profiles are obtained by use of SMM and then optimized by employing rigorous coupled-wave analysis and the simulated annealing algorithm.