Polarization management is crucial to the design, implementation, and operation of optical devices. This thesis explores the use of stress engineering for manipulating birefringence in silicon-on-insulator based waveguide systems. Two schemes are proposed: one is to implement polarization insensitive waveguides using a stressed cladding overlayer, the other adapts the polarization diversity approach by introducing novel stress-based polarization splitters. Both theoretical study and experimental demonstrations of stress-based waveguide devices are presented.