Development of Affordable Integrated Optic Chips

The goal of this proposal is to develop manufacturing technolgies for fiber pigtailed lithium niobate IOCs for Interferometric Fiber Optic Gyros (IFOG) that will reduce unit cost to $100. The opportunity here is to develop a manufacturing technology that will enable the economic, large scale use of IOCs not only for IFOGs but also for other commercial applications such as CATV, optical sensors for the utility, chemical and medical industry, and high data rate communications for deployment in the Information Highway. This proposal will look specifically at the following stages in the fabrication of IOCs: Wafer/chip manufacturing, Chip end preparation, Fiber preparation, Fiber chip attachment, and packaging. We will develop a novel active fiber alignment technique to achieve 50 dB polarization extinction and a single step cut and polish method for IOC and fiber endface preparation.