Reactive ion etching of tellurite and chalcogenide waveguides using hydrogen, methane, and argon

Abstract

The authors report in detail on the reactive plasma etching properties of tellurium and demonstrate a high quality etching process using hydrogen, methane, and argon. Very low loss planar ridge waveguides are demonstrated. Optical losses in tellurium dioxide waveguides below 0.1 dB/cm in most of the near infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum and at 1550 nm have been achieved-the lowest ever reported by more than an order of magnitude and clearly suitable for planar integrated devices. The etch process is also shown to be suitable for chalcogenide glasses which may be of importance in applications such as phase change memory devices and nonlinear integrated optics.

Dual Regimes of Ion Migration in High Repetition Rate Femtosecond Laser Inscribed Waveguides

“…Indeed waveguide amplifiers and lasers, fabricated by ultrafast laser inscription, provide in many cases a performance comparable to that exhibited by devices fabricated by ion exchange or plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition [10]. Active device fabrication by femtosecond laser inscription has been particularly interesting for materials that are unmanageable to be processed by other fabrication techniques, eg: Tellurites, Tellurides, Chalcogenides etc [11,12].…”

980nm pumped erbium doped tellurium oxide planar rib waveguide laser and amplifier with gain in S, C and L band

“…One of the major reasons for the delay in attaining integrated versions of the high quality fiber based tellurite devices has been the difficulties in fabricating low loss waveguides in an integrated platform. Tellurite EDWAs have been realized in the last few years by femtosecond laser inscription [14,15] and the discovery of reactive ion etching processes using argon, hydrogen and methane [16][17][18]. Using these methods tellurite EDWAs have been successfully fabricated in bulk glass plates [14,15] and by reactive RF sputtering of thin films followed by plasma etching [16].…”

High‐Performance Integrated Optics with Tellurite Glasses: Status and Prospects

“…Figure a clearly shows that very smoothed etched surfaces have been attained with a newly developed Ar‐/H 2 ‐/CH 4 ‐based process, this being the critical step in attaining such low waveguide losses.…”

“…Figure 2a shows a cross-section of a waveguide after etching, and Figure 2b shows the propagation loss spectrum out to 1700 nm. Figure 2a clearly shows that very smoothed etched surfaces have been attained with a newly developed Ar-/H 2 -/CH 4 -based process, 68 this being the critical step in attaining such low waveguide losses.…”