The Design And Fabrication Of Compact Polymer Thermo-optic Switch And Switch Matrix

Optical switches are the most important parts of WDM,which play a significant role in switch protection,optical crossover interconnection,optical multiplexing and routing,selfhealing and so on.Compared with the conventional optical switch,the optical switch based on polymer waveguide have been the focus of research in recent years because of their merits,such as being easily controlled,well process tolerance,small size and easily being monolithic integrated.Today's evolving telecommunication networks are focusing on small dimension,low power consumption and high speed.Polymer optical switches usually has low power consumption but its dimension can be lager.In this paper,we design and fabricate a compact and low power consumption optical switch by using polymers which have large refractive index differences.At first,we analysis planar waveguide theory by using Maxwell's equations.Then,the multimode interference effect and thermos-optical effect are introduced based on planar waveguide theory.After analyzing the theories,a compact and low power consumption 2×2 MMI-MZI thermos-optical switch has been designed by choosing suitable polymer material LFR372 and ZPU46.And the simulation results shows that the power consumption of the thermos-optical switch is 7.6mW,the crosstalk is-30 dB and the switching speed is submicrosecond.The switch was then successfully fabricated with the traditional micro-fabrication techniques,including spinning coating,vacuum evaporating,contact lithography,reactive iron etching(RIE),standard cutting and polish process.The fabricated switch presents a low power consumption of 8.8mW,crosstalk of-24.0dB.The switching time is 820?s.The length of the device is only 1.76 mm.By using the 2×2 MMI-MZI thermo-optic switch,we finally design a compact and low power consumption 4×4 optical switch matrix.The length of the device is only 4.77?m.The fabricated device shows that the power consumption is 26.6mW,the crosstalk is less than-11.4dB which meets the design expectation well.