Research And Fabrication Of All-Polymer Waveguide Devices For WDM Applications

The society today is going into a rapidly developing age of information. In orderto meet the needs of the fast growing amount of information, the communicationnetwork needs to be escalated in terms of speed, capacity and so on. The fibercommunication is a very important manner for modern communications. The devicesused in optical network nodes such as arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG),true-time-delay lines and modulators have become research hotspots bothdomestically and abroad. However, the conventional devices which only have a singlefunction can hardly meet the needs of the modern system. So the research anddevelopment of multifunctional integrated devices have become an inevitable trend.We use inorganic material such as silica, in the traditional process for thefabrication of planar optical waveguide devices. However, it is very difficult to growhigh-quality films of inorganic materials. As to the organic polymer materials, therefractive index is very easy to adjust, and the process is quite simple. So they arevery suitable for the fabrication of optical waveguide devices. For the all-polymerdevices, the polymer substrates are used to take the place of the silicon substrates. Thetemperature sensitivity of the devices can be reduced. And the production costs can besignificantly reduced too. So the all-polymer method has become a very promisingresearch field. In recent years, the performances of polymer optical waveguidedevices have been improved a lot due to the exploration of researchers. A variety ofoptical devices that have different functions are integrated on one chip. In this way,the efficiency of the network can be improved. There are very great prospects for theapplications of the integrated devices.The contents of this paper are mainly the preparation and testing work for theall-polymer AWGs, delay lines, thermo-optic modulators, and integrated devices. Theexperiment works done are as follows:（1）We explore how to fabricate the all-polymer waveguides using the polymersubstrates. SU-8and P(MMA-GMA) are used as core material and cladding material.The transmission loss of the waveguides we have obtained is about2dB/cm.（2）The all-polymer AWG is successfully prepared. The shift of TE and TM modes of the device is0.08nm, and the output wavelength drift with temperature is-0.03nm/℃, which proves the good temperature and polarization independentproperties of all-polymer waveguides.（3）The all-polymer ultra long waveguide delay lines and the M-Z typethermo-optic modulator are successfully prepared. The time-delay increments canreach the order of ps. The modulator has good thermo-optic performances, whichproves that the thermo-electrode structures can be used for thermal tuning forall-polymer waveguides.（4）The all-polymer multi-function integrated chip, which includes an AWG,delay lines and M-Z waveguides, is fabricated. So far, we have tested the lighttransmission performance of the device.Research works for four kinds of all-polymer devices are made in this paper. Theexperiment results we have obtained here can be very valuable for further researchworks.