Recent Progress of Imprinted Polymer Photonic Waveguide Devices and Applications

Abstract

Polymers are promising materials for fabricating photonic integrated waveguide devices. Versatile functional devices can be manufactured using a simple process, with low cost and potential mass-manufacturing. This paper reviews the recent progress of polymer photonic integrated devices fabricated using the UV imprinting technique. The passive polymer waveguide devices for wavelength filtering, power splitting, and light collecting, and the active polymer waveguide devices based on the thermal-optic tuning effect, are introduced. Then, the electro-optic (EO) modulators, by virtue of the high EO coefficient of polymers, are described. Finally, the photonic biosensors, which are based on low-cost and biocompatible polymer platforms, are presented.

Fabrication of Sub-Micron Polymer Waveguides through Two-Photon Polymerization in Polydimethylsiloxane

“…The development of new materials and novel fabrication technologies for the realization of optical waveguides have attracted great attention. In particular, polymer-based waveguides are crucial soft photonic building blocks [3][4][5] for the development of complex multifunctional platforms, such as chip-to-chip interconnects in electronic systems [6,7], lab-on-chips [8], optofluidic platforms [9], biomedical sensing [10,11], wearable physiological monitoring [12], and optogenetics [13][14][15]. Single-mode optical waveguides have been fabricated through direct laser writing (DLW), soft lithography, and thermal curing methods using poly-siloxane and other commercially available polymer materials [16][17][18][19].…”

5-Channel Polymer/Silica Hybrid Arrayed Waveguide Grating

“…Compared with silica-based devices, polymer-based devices can skip several steps in manufacture, resulting in reduced prices for the setup and, especially for small batch sizes, a reduced price per unit [15][16][17]. Moreover, due to good compatibility on diverse substrates, polymer-based devices can provide suitable platforms for the hybrid integration of photonic chips [18][19][20]. Besides having the advantages of low cost, small birefringence, easy control of refractive index, large thermo-optic coefficients, and easy fabrication, compared with inorganic materials, biocompatibility is an especially important and unique feature of polymers, which makes them an ideal material platform for photonic integrated waveguide biosensors [18].…”

“…Moreover, due to good compatibility on diverse substrates, polymer-based devices can provide suitable platforms for the hybrid integration of photonic chips [18][19][20]. Besides having the advantages of low cost, small birefringence, easy control of refractive index, large thermo-optic coefficients, and easy fabrication, compared with inorganic materials, biocompatibility is an especially important and unique feature of polymers, which makes them an ideal material platform for photonic integrated waveguide biosensors [18]. We built up a multi-channel sensor system based on separate devices, including a dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and sensors [21].…”

Functional Micro–Nano Structure with Variable Colour: Applications for Anti-Counterfeiting

“…e arti cial structural colour is produced by the interactions of natural light with microstructures, which is di erent from pigmentary colour produced by selective absorption of natural light. With its high brightness and saturation but no fading, iridescent phenomenon and polarization e ect, structural colour is widely used in many elds such as display and imaging technology [16], printing and painting [17], textile industry [18], uorescence manipulation [19], energy conversion [20,21] information storage devices [22,23], sensors [24][25][26][27], photonic devices [28] and anti-counterfeiting technology [29][30][31][32].…”