Integrated optical components using hybrid organic-inorganic materials prepared by sol-gel technology

Abstract

A technological platform based on low-temperature hybrid sol-gel method for fabrication of optical waveguides and integrated optical components has been developed. The developed chemistry for doping incorporation in the host network provides a range of refractive indexes (1.444-1.51) critical for device optimization. A passivation method for improving long-term stability of organic-inorganic sol-gel material is reported. The degradation of waveguide loss over time due to moisture adsorption from the atmosphere is drastically suppressed by coating the material with a protective thin SiO2 film. The results indicate a long-term optical loss below 0.3 dB/cm for protected waveguides. The theory of multimode interference couplers employing self-imaging effect is described. A novel approach for design of high-performance MMI devices in low-contrast material is proposed. The design method is based on optimization of refractive index contrast and width of a multimode waveguide (the body of MMI couplers) to achieve a maximum number of constructively interfering modes resulting to the best self-imaging. This optimization is carried out using 3D BPM simulations. This method was applied to design 1 x 4, 1 x 12, and 4 x 4 MMI couplers and led to a superior performance in excess loss, power imbalance in output ports, and polarization sensitivity. Taking advantage of the inherent input-output phase relations in a 4 x 4 MMI coupler, an optical 90° hybrid is realized by incorporation a Y-junction to coherently excite two ports of the coupler. A series of MMI couplers were fabricated and characterized. The experimental results are in good agreement with the design. Measured performance of the sol-gel derived MMI components was compared to analogues fabricated by other technologies. The comparison demonstrates the superior performance of the sol-gel devices. The polarization sensitivity of all fabricated couplers is below 0.05 dB.