Planar optical integrated circuits based on UV-patternable sol-gel technology

Abstract

Planar lightwave circuits (PLCs) made from photo-patternable sol-gel materials are attracting considerable R&D interest. This is due to the advantages they offer for applications in optical telecommunications and their compatibility with existing silicon technology process equipment. In particular, the ability to produce devices compatible with silica optical fibres using a straightforward, environmentally friendly, photolithographic process is very attractive. The approach is now well-established in the literature and typically involves the incorporation of an acrylate moiety in the sol-gel precursor mixture, thereby providing a photo-polymerisability function. In this work, we report on the fabrication of passive optical components and devices designed for datacomms applications using visible diode lasers or the 1 st telecom window. Silica-based sol-gel waveguides have been integrated in an opto-electronic multichip module (OE-MCM) demonstrator for optical interconnect applications. We have fabricated an 8-channel transmitter module for parallel optical interconnects (POI) based on 2 sub-modules: (a) an optical interface sub-assembly based on photo-patterned sol-gel optical waveguides, and (b) an optoelectronic component sub-module comprising an array of VCSELs. We describe here the fabrication, characterization and performance of the optical components and a POI Transmitter chip.