Fabrication and characteristics of thin-film optical switches using fluorinated silicon oxide deposited by a liquid-phase technique

Abstract

Optical switching devices have been studied using thin-film optical waveguides with fluorinated silicon oxide (SiOF) films deposited by a liquid-phase deposition (LPD) technique. This report focuses on the structure of the thermo-optical (TO) switch and its optimization. TO devices with double-and triple-layer structures were fabricated using a material with an organic spin-on-glass (SOG) cladding layer and a liquid-phase deposited (LPD) SiOF core layer. The maximum extinction ratio of 15.97 dB was obtained for the double-layer structure TO devices at the half-wavelength power of 2.78 W, and at the heater area of 0.02 mm2. The response time decreased with decrease in the heater area for both double-and triple-layer structures. The response time as short as 6.3 ms was obtained at the heater area of 0.02 mm2 for the double-layer structure. For the triple-layer structure, an even shorter response time of 2ms was achieved at the heater area of 0.08 mm2, and this was over one order of magnitude smaller than that for the double-layer structure at the same heater area (280 ms).