Heterogenous Integration of MEMS and GHz Electro-Optic Polymer Modulators for RF Communications

Heterogeneous integration of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) with polymer based electro-optic modulators is proposed, to produce compact and deployable modulators for RF photonics applications. Current technology allows fabrication of compact andlight-weight modulators, but these interferometric devices are still not truly deployable, because they require control and feedback electronics for balancing and stabilization. Here we proposed to integrated GHz Mach-Zehnder modulators with KHz-MHz MEMSbased oscillator and feedback electronics to balance the modulator at quadrature, thus eliminating the need for bulky and power dissipating external oscillators and lock-in amplifiers. The method takes advantage of two state of the art technologies thathave reached certain degree of maturity. Polymer modulators have been shown to work at frequencies over 100 GHz with drive voltages of less than 1V, whereas MEMS based oscillators and high Q filters have been successfully fabricated in the KHz-MHzfrequencies. Integration will be carried out on Si substrates, where polymer waveguides will be grown and processed on top of MEMS circuitry. Combining feedback electronics will allow 2 to 3 orders of magnitude reduction in size, mass and powerconsumption over current methods, and will enable mass production and low cost fabrication of high-frequency modulators.The proposed integration approach allows for fabrication of low power consumption, compact, lightweight and deployable modulators to beused for high-speed communication systems. In the commercial industry, markets include telecommunication industries for voice, video and data transmission. Military markets include RF photonics and phased-array radar applications. Both MEMS and polymerelectro-optics use the same lithographic processing step on Si substrates, therefore heterogeneous integration has the potential for low cost mass production.