Electro-optic polymer digital optical switch with photobleached waveguides and a self-aligned electrode

Abstract An electro-optic polymer digital optical switch is fabricated by using photobleached waveguides and a self-aligned electrode. Its features include wavelength-insensitive operation, fabrication tolerance, and flexible design. Its potential advantages are low coupling loss to the optical fiber and wide bandwidth. To improve its switching performance determined by the mode coupling in the branch, the guided mode profiles of photobleached waveguides are controlled by the photobleaching time. A self-aligned electrode is employed to achieve an efficient overlap between the optical and the electric fields and to smoothly introduce tapered electrodes. The measured cross-talk is better than −21 dB at 1.32 μm and 1.55 μm, and the extinction ratio of each output port is greater than 20 dB.