FABRICATION OF SU-8 BASED ELECTRO-OPTIC SWITCH USING ALL-WET ETCHING TECHNIQUE

Abstract

Polymeric Disperse Red 1 (DR1)/SU-8 electro-optic (EO) switch incorporating inverted-rib waveguide structure is designed and fabricated by all-wet etching process. The guest-host EO material DR1/SU-8 has been successfully synthetized and its optical properties are characterized in detail. The DR1/SU-8 material presents a low processing cost, an excellent photostability and a large EO coefficient of 15.4 pm/V. The characteristic parameters of both the inverted-rib waveguide and the coplanar waveguide electrodes are carefully designed and simulated. By all-wet etching process, the optimized Mach–Zehnder interferometer switch is successfully fabricated with a lower fiber-to-fiber insertion loss of 9.6 dB. The switch rise time and fall time are 322 ns and 294 ns, respectively.