Polymer M-Z Thermal Optical Switch at 532-nm Based on Wet Etching and UV-Writing Waveguide.

Jiawen Lv,Fei Wang,Daming Zhang,Yue Yang,Baizhu Lin,Yue Sun,Shuai Li,Yunji Yi,Yue Cao

doi:10.3390/polym11060995

Jiawen Lv, Fei Wang + Show 7 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/polym11060995

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Abstract

Polymer thermal optical switches have low power consumption and 532 nm is the communication window of polymer fiber. Polymer thermal optical switches at 532 nm are rarely reported, because of switching extinction ratio properties that are restricted by modes of the waveguide. Single mode waveguide at 532 nm is hard to fabricate due to the dissolution of core and cladding materials. A polymer M-Z thermal optical switch at 532 nm was first demonstrated based on the wet etching method. The proposed thermal optical switch was consisted of silica substrate, photosensitive polymer core, and cladding material. The device was fabricated and tested with the power consumption of 6.55mW, extinction of 4.8 dB, and switching time of 0.23 ms (rise)/0.28 ms (down). An optimized switch structure combining with the UV-writing technique and graphene thermal conduction layer was proposed based on the experiments above. A side electrode was designed to reduce the power consumption and the switching time. The optimized device was calculated to have a power consumption of 1.5 mW. The switching time of the UV-writing device was simulated to be 18.2 μs (rise) and 85 μs (down). The device is promising in the wearable device and laser radar area.

Highlights

As a new method of communication, optical signal achieves faster network speed and wider bandwidth
We proposed a UV-writing method [17,18,19] to achieve few modes waveguide in order to optimize the extinction ratio
A UV-writing thermal optical switch with graphene layer was proposed in order to solve the low extinction ratio problem

Summary

Introduction

As a new method of communication, optical signal achieves faster network speed and wider bandwidth. In 2012, Lei Liang fabricated a Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) thermal optical switch at 1550 nm wavelength while using a hybrid silica/polymer waveguide structure. The hybrid silica/polymer structure ensures low power consumption and reduces the switching time. With the M-Z structure, the waveguide mode will have an effect on the extinction ratio and other parameters of the device. Ridge the waveguide structure is an effective method to achieve single mode waveguide [15,16]. The single mode ridge polymer waveguide at 532 nm has large coupling loss between the device and the fiber. Another method is adjusting the refractive index of polymers.

Materials and Methods

Conclusions