Study On Polymer/Silicon Thermo-optic Switch And Switch Array

With the fast developing of the optical communication technology, all opticalnetwork (AON) appears at this historic moment. Optical switch and switch array playan important role in optical network, so many researchers have carried out a lot ofresearch. Compared with the traditional mechanical optical switch, the planarwaveguide optical switch has obvious advantages, such as small size, high reliability,strong anti-jamming and low cost. We choose the polymer materials to design andfabricate the optical switch, because there are many kinds of polymer with low priceand high thermo-optical coefficient which can be used to fabricate thermo-opticswitch and switch array with low power consumption and fast response.The present research of the thermo-optic switch focuses on reducing powerconsumption, improving response speed and developing large-scale switch array withhigh level of integration. Aiming at this requirement, we carry out a systematicresearch on the polymer Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and total internalreflection (TIR) thermo-optic switches in this thesis.MZI thermo-optic switch has the advantages of simple structure and low powerconsumption. In order to improve the response speed, a polymer/SiO2MZIthermo-optic switch is designed and fabricated. Because of the large thermalconductivity of SiO2, the response time of the device is only about200μs. In order toreduce the power consumption greatly, we fabricate a polymer MZI thermo-opticswitch with ultralow power consumption of2.59mW by using the polymer as theunder cladding and controlling the cladding thickness. This performance has obviousadvantages compared with the same kind of polymer thermo-optic switch.TIR thermo-optic switch has the advantages of compact structure and largeprocess tolerance. We design a kind of2×2TIR thermo-optic switch with a powerconsumption of50mW, and crosstalk of-22dB. A novel3×3TIR thermo-opticswitch array is fabricated based on the2×2TIR thermo-optic switch, which canrealize the optical path switching. At last a larger TIR switch array is designed toreduce the number of switch elements and simplify the structure of switch array to thegreatest extent.