Studies On Ion-exchanged Glass Waveguide Devices Manufacturing Technology

Ion-exchanged glass integrated optic devices have attracted considerable attention in the last decades. These devices are promising for their several figures of merit, which include low propagation loss, high rare earth ion concentration incorporation, fine matching of optical properties to single mode fiber, low coupling loss, high environment stability, easy of integration, as well as cost effectiveness.This report deals in detail with theoritical and technological problems relevant to glass integrated optics elements manufactured by ion exchange process, as well as further development and application of this technology in the field of integrated optics. The report is mainly composed of four parts:In the first part of this report, we give a detailed introduction to the ion-exchanged glass waveguide devices and its manufacturing technology, then the state of arts of ion-exchanged glass waveguide devices manufacturing technology is briefly reviewed.In the second part of this report, Design methodology for ion-exchanged glass waveguide devices is demonstrated. A series of mathematic model, relates waveguide characterists to its manufacturing parameters, is depicted. After which, characterization method of glass waveguide is recounted. In this part an iteration approach to reconstructing planar waveguide refractive index profile is proposed, which is superior to the widely used IWKB method in both self-consistence and accuracy.The third part of the report deals with the experimental work. Manufacturing process and measurement results of 1 X 4 power splitter is given.We discussed three novel integrated optic devices in the last part. The first one is a fiber coupler specially designed for laser diode array; the second one is a integrated optic Bragg grating made by ion exchange; the third one is a novel integrated optic grating device, which is essentially a computer generated waveguide hologram (CGWH) for wavelength demultiplexing.Results show that in the investigation of ion-exchanged glass integrated optics manufacturing, emphasas should be put on two points: one is performance optimization of waveguide devices, the other is novel integraed optics devices developments by fully taking advantages of the characteristics of the ion exchange process.