Active Multi-Functional Polymeric Material With Modulation, Switching, and Amplification Capabilities

The achievement in realizing low-loss waveguides on any surface of interests using photolime gel polymer motivates us to further investigate the feasibility of employing such a unique material as a multi-functional polymer that can provide modulation, switching, wavelength conversion and amplification simultaneously on any optoelectronic substrate of interest. In this program, we propose to research on the polymeric material synthesis through which a fully integrated version of a polymer-based integrated optical module containing channel waveguides, electrooptic modulation/switching devices and optical wavelength conversion/amplifiers on a single substrate. Due to the graded index (GRIN) characteristic of the waveguide, such a device can be built on any surface of interest. The first device module contains a spin-coated polymer waveguide layer with a lithographically defined channel waveguide region having two different dopants, i.e., rare earth ions and electrooptic chromophore. The first dopant is to provide gain and wavelength conversion. The second dopant is to provide electrooptic modulation through the index perturbation induced by the electrical traveling waves. Note that the two photopolymer-based holographic mirrors are built to provide a cavity for lasing and for phase modulation. Such a device module will be very useful for not only BMDO-related network applications (for example, the MCPS network developed by JPL) but also to several commercial applications. Realization of optical communications depends on the successful transmission of high speed signals among processing elements, memories and other peripherals with minimum losses. A reliable multifunctional polymer-based photonic integrated circuit is essential for such a task. The transferability of the polymer thin film onto any optoelectronic substrate of interest is a pivotal advantage that is not achievable using inorganic crystal such as LiNbO3 and GaAs. Other potential applications include perfect shuffle networks, optical sensing devices, nonlinear optics, switching devices, and plastic fibers for local area networks.