Fluorinated photopolymer cascaded MMI-based integrated optical waveguide switching matrix with encoding functions

Area of Science:

• Photonics and Optical Engineering
• Materials Science
• Integrated Optics

Background:

• Integrated optical switching matrices are crucial for high-speed optical communication networks.
• Thermo-optic switching offers a viable method for controlling optical signals in integrated devices.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and fabricate a thermo-optic tunable 4x4 cascaded multimode interference (MMI) based integrated optical waveguide switching matrix.
• To evaluate the performance characteristics of the fabricated device for potential applications in optical networking.

Main Methods:

• Utilized photopolymer lightwave circuits for device fabrication.
• Employed fluorinated epoxy-terminated copolycarbonate for the waveguide core and polymethylmethacrylate for the cladding.
• Simulated and analyzed driving power for binary encoding of optical switching states.

Main Results:

• Achieved a measured insertion loss of less than 7.1 dB.
• Attained a maximum crosstalk in adjacent channels below -30 dB.
• Demonstrated a switching time of approximately 220 μs and an extinction ratio of 21.5 dB.

Conclusions:

• The fabricated thermo-optic tunable switching matrices exhibit promising performance metrics.
• The flexible encoding technique is suitable for developing optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) network coders.