Design and Fabrication of Electro-Optic Polymer Waveguide Devices

Abstract

A couple of general guidelines for the design of electro-optic poled polymer waveguide devices are suggested. Firstly, the refractive index of one buffer layer needs to be close to the guiding layer to control the mode size and that of the other buffer layer to be much smaller than the guiding layer to lower the modulation voltage without the sacrifice of the mode size. In the asymmetric waveguide structure, the mode size is found to be solely determined by one buffer layer which has closer refractive index to the guiding layer. Secondly, the guiding layer needs to be fabricated as thick as possible within the range of the single mode operation for a given material system.