On-chip integrated optical switch based on polymer waveguides

Abstract Optical polymer is one of the promising materials for photonic integrated devices that can be processed with simple, flexible and semiconductor compatible technology. Especially, optical polymer with the advantages of high thermo-optic (TO) and electro-optic (EO) coefficients has been widely applied in optical waveguide switches. However, most of the current optical switches are independent with single function. It is essential to develop an on-chip integrated device with multilayer for signal manipulation. In this paper, we propose an on-chip 3-dimensional integrated optical switch based on the EO polymer-clad waveguide incorporate with the TO tunable vertical coupler. The proposed integrated optical switch could realize the function-integration of the adjustable 3D optical connection and the high-speed modulation. A typical fabricated switch shows an insertion loss of 16.3 dB and an extinction ratio of 16.0 dB at the driving power of 48.2 mW. The dynamic characteristics of TO and EO switching functions of the device were also measured in this work.