Integration of III-V Semiconductor Optical Sources with Electro-optic Polymer Waveguide Devices Using Micromachined Reflective Elements

High efficiency optical coupling between light sources and guided wave photonic devices is a key element in achieving compact and high performance integrated photonic systems. These systems will share a generic requirement of a source, a detector, and both active and passive guided wave components. A wide variety of materials exist in which to fabricate these guided wave components, but electro-optic (EO) polymers are rapidly emerging as the material of choice for a variety of reasons: potentially lower cost, higher speed, and greater efficiency, coupled with a flexibility of design and fabrication which is based on a spin casting technology. This greatly facilitates the hybridization of polymer devices with electronic and optoelectronic devices on a semiconductor substrate. It is the goal of this proposed research, therefore, to design and fabricate a multifunction photonic chip which efficiently couples. 1.3 um radiation from an InGaAs/ InAIAs quantum well LED into a single mode EO polymer channel waveguide. The coupling mechanism will be a corrugated grating coupler fabricated in the polymer cladding that is optimized to a novel vertically coupled LED design. The technology developed under this SBIR will greatly facilitate the integration of photonic components on a common substrate.