Design And Fabrication Of Polymer Based Micro Optical Devices By Laser Direct Writing

Proposed in 1960s, integrated optics has gone through a rapid development in the past decades. The fields related to this subject have been strengthened to many branch areas such as bio-chemistry and applications for measurement besides traditional optical communication. And it has been an important part for modern communication, medical application and many other areas that are close to daily life.As the need for integrated optical devices has been on the rise, improvement on fabrication efficiency and reduction of production costs have caught the attention of researchers. In this situation, polymer came into the sight of many research centers by the advantage of its unique optical characteristics and low cost. This stuff has taken a big part in the micro optical device related fields during application of its role as the basic material.Under such a situation, we have been working on the UV curable polymer based micro optical devices, and the related research has been included in this paper, which is divided into the following two parts:a) A kind of polymer based multimode optical power divider with asymmetric branches has been designed and fabricated for the interconnection of LAN communication.b) A polymer based four beam turbidity sense cell has been proposed andfabricated by the combination of optical waveguide and measurement theory. Details in the first parts are as following:1. Sharp angle in the straight Y branch of traditional splitter has been abandoned and brand new kind of curve based branch has been proposed.2. New asymmetric branch of next level has been designed to achieve the goal of equal division for multimode light power. Cascade splitter structure has been realized by the Beam Propagation Method, equations for the splitter have also been obtained. 3. UV laser direct writing platform has been established. Splitters have been fabricated by the use of polymer material under the method of laser direct writing. Light splitting has been analyzed by experiment.As for the second part, work we have done includes:1. Channel waveguide based turbidity sensor cell by four beam turbidity measuring principle theory has been obtained with the help of BPM.2. Miniaturized sensor samples have been fabricated by UV direct writing. Characteristics of the actual cell structure have been analyzed by Ray Tracing Method.3. Turbidity standards have been analyzed with the constructed measuring system and multi-layer neural network has been used for calibration.At the end of this paper, former research on power splitter by soft-lithography has been briefly introduced.This paper is in the purpose of integrated optical devices with low cost material and fast fabricating method. The related research has tried a lot for higher fabrication efficiency and lower production cost by innovative structure design and fabrication method.