Development of components for IFOG-based inertial measurement units using polymer waveguide fabrication technologies

Abstract

Active and passive polymer materials have been successfully used in the development of highly accurate, compact and low cost guided-wave components: an optical transceiver and a phase modulator, for inertial measurement units (IMUs) based on the interferometric fibre optic gyroscope (IFOG) technology for precision guidance in navigation systems. High performance and low noise transceivers with high optical power and good spectral quality were fabricated using a silicon-bench architecture. Low loss phase modulators with low halfwave drive voltage (Vπ) have been fabricated with a backscatter compensated design using polarizing waveguides consisting of CLD- and FTC-type high performance electro-optic (E-O) chromophores. Gyro bias stability of less than 0.02° h−1 has been demonstrated with these guided-wave components.

Low half-wave voltage Y-branch electro-optic polymer modulator based on side-chain polyurethane-imide

“…The electro-optic (EO) modulator is a key component in many important applications such as fiber-optic communications systems, 1-3 microwave photonics, 4-6 optical interconnects, 7,8 and interferometric optical sensing systems, [9][10][11] etc. In conventional applications, the EO modulators are made of inorganic crystalline materials such as lithium niobate (LiNbO 3 ) by Ti-diffusion and proton exchange methods.…”