Polymer-based integrated optical waveguide true time delay for wideband phased array antennas

While simple planar waveguide components are well understood devices and their technologies mature fast, higher demand from system integrators require a new breed of photonic devices, integrated optical circuits, that incorporate many features into one device. Polymer materials are excellent candidates for photonic integrated circuits. This thesis presents the design, fabrication and experimental results of a polymer based integrated optical waveguide true time delay for wideband phased array antennas. During the design process a review of each individual component was complemented with the review of integration issues from a system performance point of view. Based on the complex design process, a successful fabrication of a working 2 bit binary integrated digital phase shifter was fabricated and tested. The total insertion loss of the device was 33.9 dB. In the required switches a low 3.25 Volts Vpi was achieved. The crosstalk of the switches based on the performance of the device were estimated to be around 20 dB. Though the device exhibited large do bias drift due to the presence of do voltages across the interferometer's arms, the RF phase shifting for the required 5.3 GHz RF signal was within 6 percent of the desired values.;The recent advances in polymer photonic technology must be recognized and strongly imply that polymer materials will play an ever increasing role in future photonic applications.