The Research On Polymer/Si Arrayed Waveguide Grating Multiplexer

Human society is entering into an information age powered by rapidly evolving technologies in areas of microelectronics, optoelectronics, computing and communications. However, as the result of the rapid increase of information, continuous requests have been made for the increase of speed, the enlargement of capacity and the decrease of cost of communications, some traditional communication technologies and devices could not fulfill the demands of applications. Therefore, it is imperious demand to enlarge the speed and capacity for the current fiber network. The wavelength division multiplexer (WDM) is an efficient method. An arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) multiplexer can offer some basic functions including multiplexing, demultiplexing, optical add/drop multiplexing (OADM) and optical interconnection. Also, it possesses some advantages, such as easy optical integrating, narrow wavelength spacing, much more signal channels and low crosstalk. Recently, considerable attention and great efforts have been focused on the development of polymer AWG, because of their excellent particular features, such as easy fabrication, low propagation loss, small birefringence, and easy control of the refractive index. At present, many developed countries have put abundant researchers and money into the study of these devices, and have made great progress. The AWG consists of input/output channel waveguides, input/output concave slab waveguides composed of many channel waveguides with a constant path difference between adjacent waveguides. It can work as grating and complete the function of multiplexing and demultiplexing for light with different wavelength. This dissertation is concentrated on the polymer/Si AWG multiplexer. A 32-channel fluorinated polymer/Si AWG is reported in this dissertation. The channel spacing of the AWG multiplexer is 0.8 nm (100 GHz). The insertion loss of the multiplexer is 10.3~15.3 dB and the crosstalk less than –20 dB. The main contents are as follows: 1 . Cross-linkable poly-methyl-methacrylate–co-glyciclyl methacrylate (PMMA-GMA)as cladding material has been synthesized. The core material is the mixture of PMMA-GMA and bis-phonel-A epoxy. The relative refractive index difference of the core and clad materials is 0.8%. Certain important parameters are...