Polymeric waveguide devices for optical communications

Abstract

Recently, we developed a wavelength converter, a 16-arrayed electro-optic (EO) Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulator, polarization adjustable and athermal arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs), and a wavelength channel selector by using all polymers. We designed and fabricated periodically poled nonlinear optical (NLO) polymer waveguides for the wavelength converter. Difference-frequency generation (DFG) process with a quasi-phase-matching (QPM) scheme was used. An all polymer-based wavelength channel selector composed of 16-channel EO polymer modulator array between two polymer AWGs is proposed and fabricated using chip-to-chip bonding of the three optical polymeric waveguide devices. For this, the 16-arrayed polymeric optical modulator and AWGs are respectively fabricated using EO and low-loss optical polymers. For these two-typed devices, we have synthesized new side chain NLO polymers and used low-loss optical polymers, designed and developed by ZenPhotonics, Inc. The developed these photonic devices were discussed in details from materials to packaging.