The burial-depth-independent ion-exchanged glass waveguides and their applications

Abstract

The problem of ion-exchanged waveguides that the waveguides burial-depth strongly depends on waveguide width was investigated in this paper. We resolved this problem by using a special ion-exchanged waveguides fabrication technique and wavelength multiplexers based on the array-waveguide grating (AWG) principle are fabricated with ion-exchanged waveguides in glass for 1550nm. The process of the waveguides fabrication and the devices propagation characteristics are presented. The insertion loss is below 8.5dB and with a cross talk of -20dB for 16-channel 100GHz devices benefit from the burial-depth uniformity between channel waveguides and slab waveguides. The AWGs are almost polarization insensitive because the refractive index profile of the waveguides is nearly concentric and the waveguides are diffused into stress-free glass substrates, same as the waveguides material approximately. The transverse electric / transverse magnetic (TE/TM) shift of the wavelength response is only 0.03nm for a 16-channel 100GHz AWG.