Analysis And Fabrication Of Direct Couple Electro-Optic Switches/Modulator Based On Poled Polymer Materials

For the present, the improvement of optical communication technology is linked closely with the people's livehood, all optical networks will become the mainstream of information technology, optical switch is the key part in the optical communication, so its research and development is impartible with the whole country, it has a fast response, long life and low insertion loss, so it becomes the research hotspot in recent years.From the elements of optical devices, we know direct couple switch is a kind of electro-optic switches , quick switch speed and compact structure are its advantages, from the material, poled polymer has high electro-optic coefficient, low dielectric constant, low price and simple process technology, so direct couple poled polymer electro-optic switches have a good foreground.The core work of this thesis is based on the theoretical design, we apply two different polymer materials to make the directional coupler optical switch with different structures, we get a complete test result after the test.First we introduced the background of development of optical switch in this paper, and then made a research into the directional coupler switch which was both from the material and device structure. The main works in the experiment as follows:1,The DR1/TiO2-SiO2 material was synthesized independently, in the process of the material film, we have overcome the difficulties in material such as its thin film and the crack formation issues. A strip-loading waveguide structure was used for the directional coupler waveguide to achieve a better dissemination, we have proved that we can obtain a good spot near-field output .2,We have designed a coplanar electrode structure, we use alloy as the lower electrode in order to reduce the impact of electrodes on device performance, after the fabrication of the device, the test results proved that coplanar electrode structure is useful to switching devices.3,We synthesis DR1/SU-8 material which has fine optical properties and electrical properties, the concentration of DR1 we have doped is 3%, the ratio of SU-8 and its dilution is 4:1, because SU-8 is a kind of UV sensitive materials, so a lot of experiments were done to find good experimental conditions which concluding the exposure time, cure temperature and time ,after then we fabricated good film.4,When I have familiared with the theory knowledge and materials , I fabricated and tested of electro-optic switch device and optimized the structure, achieved the electro-optic modulation.A directional coupled waveguide structure based on organic/inorganic hybrid material was designed, we obtained a clear coupling of light output, PMMA/GMA was selected as the cladding material and the fabrication process of polymer waveguide devices was introduced, after that the device was measured. Finally the modulation voltage curve at the 10kHz signal was obtained.SU-8 has good optical properties: we can obtain a better vertical sidewall compared to PMMA as the core layer. Considering the refractive index matching problem, we select DR1/SU-8 as the electro-optic materials and we began the fabrication of rib waveguide switch devices, finally we obtained a complete square wave switching curve.The data of researches above about the structure and materials verified the impact of the device is useful to the optimization of poled polymer electro-optic switches.