Ecriture directe de circuits optiques plans dans des couches minces de silice sur silicium par ablation au laser de dioxyde de carbone

Passive components used in integrated optics have been a subject of extensive research in the last few years. The fabrication of optical planar waveguides is mainly done by lithography which includes several chemical processes and the use of photo-masks. However, this fabrication technique requires a significant investment in infrastructure since specialized installations are necessary to carry out the processing using several sequential steps. Other emergent techniques of direct laser writing have to some extent addressed the issue of reducing the number of steps involved. Silica is one of the materials most used for manufacturing optical planar circuits. Silica has a strong absorption at 10,6 mum which is the wavelength of the CO2 laser. The goal of this thesis is to show the possibility of manufacturing optical waveguides by a new technique based on a direct writing scheme using CW CO2 laser, in silica thin films on silicon deposited by PECVD. Instead of writing the waveguide by changing the refractive index of the material, this new technique ablates by the laser adjacent grooves on both sides of what becomes the core of the waveguide. The width and the depth of these grooves can be controlled by modifying the spatial profile of the laser beam and by altering the experimental parameters such as the irradiated power and the writing speed. The zone thermally affected by the laser was studied and the results showed a decrease in the refractive index of the glass close to the guiding layer. The waveguides fabricated in a few seconds by this technique, are thus buried and exhibit low insertion losses. The experimental results and simulations obtained by the Beam Propagation Method (BPM) lead us to the optimization of the direct writing process using a CO2 laser to fabricate waveguides and thus allow the manufacturing of a 1 x 4 power splitter based on the multimode interferences principle. The optical performances of the power splitter are comparable with devices produced commercially. The direct CO2 laser writing scheme is very promising and attractive as it is potentially able to eliminate a large number of processing steps required for manufacturing waveguides, as well as in reducing the manufacturing time by a significant amount.