Abstract
Electro-optic polymers have unique photonic, electro-optic and mechanical properties that make them attractive to use in a wide range of devices starting from ultra-high bandwidth light modulators for optical communications to miniature low power components for on-chip optical interconnects. The main building blocks of those devices are optical waveguides, that due to versatility of the polymers can be fabricated as either traditional multi-layer polymer structures, silicon nano-slots filled with the polymer, or dynamically created waveguides based on field-induced guiding. In this paper we cover various types of waveguides and analyze their optimum designs depending on application.
Highlights
Electro-optic (EO) polymers are unique materials having many advantages over inorganic materials for the wide range of applications—from optical network components and optical interconnects to millimeter and microwave photonics
We review different design configurations and analyze their advantages and limitations
The example of the photoresist-based patterned EO polymer waveguide is shown in Figure 1(a) with 3.2 μm polyurethane lower cladding shown in blue
Summary
Electro-optic (EO) polymers are unique materials having many advantages over inorganic materials for the wide range of applications—from optical network components and optical interconnects to millimeter and microwave photonics. They have very large EO coefficients, low optical loss (in the 1.3 and 1.55 μm telecommunication windows), low dispersion of refractive index between optical frequencies and millimeter waves, as well as high bandwidth [1,2]. To create a miniature EO light modulator for the highest on-chip integration, size and power efficiency would be critical This requires integration with silicon photonics and use of either slotted [5] or photonic crystal waveguide [6,7]. We consider different parameter that have to be optimized and the corresponding waveguide configuration that can be used
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