Design And Fabrication Experiment Of Polymeric Arrayed-waveguide Grating

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology is emerging in response to the rapid increase of bandwidth and capacity requirements in fiber communication systems and networks. In recent years, high performance and sophisticated photonic devices have been developed to meet WDM system requirements. The components based on arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) represent one of the key enabling technologies for WDM systems. It makes the cost of devices decrease greatly because of low cost of material and simpleness of fabrication when polymeric material is used to research devices of photoelectron and integrated optics. This thesis emphasizes on the techniques of polymeric AWG design, configuration optimization and fabrication technology. The dissertation introduced principles, unique characteristics and system-related pertinent issues of AWG. In order to promoting these performances, some amelioration measures on design and procedure were summarized. Modeling and a suit of flow and program of designing each configuration parameter of AWG device were performed, in which each configuration parameter was achieved directly according to enactment of desired performance and simulated directly by BPM in optical CAD software to get the spectral response of AWG. Based on above production, every configuration parameter of 16 channels AWG with polymeric material compounded by our lab was designed and optimized. The mask of 16×16 AWG device was also designed and fabricated. Flat-top AWGs are more welcome in actual application. The dissertation studied a configuration with a parabolic horn added as the input waveguide to a slab waveguide to realize the flat spectral response. The effects of spectral response of AWG device as the configuration parameters of parabolic horn were discussed. We can choose the optimized parameter according to the spectral response. A flat-top AWG with low chromatic dispersion was obtained through analyse and design. The investigation of the fabrication procedure of the polymer thin film planar waveguides is the important work of industrialization of device. In the thesis, the fluridized polyimide materials compounded by our lab and the fabrication procedure of span-sputtering-photolithography-ICP (inductive coupled plasma) etching were utilized to fabricate polymer thin film planar waveguides and satisfactory polymer thin film planar waveguides were obtained. Our work would be a good beginning for further investigation into the fabrication of polymer thin film planar waveguides.