Advances in polymer waveguide devices

Material and fabrication advances have brought polymer high speed, low voltage EO modulators close to commercial development. The technology is now being applied to more complex photonic switches and circuits and we will review some of the latest applications of polymers in photonics. We will briefly review the state of the art for high band-width, low voltage optical modulators for applications in fiber communication systems and in RF photonics. Using an EO polymer, APC/CLD, we have demonstrated a waveguide Mach Zehnder modulator operating in a push-pull mode with low frequency V_π of 1.2 V at 1300 nm and 1.8 V at 1550 nm. EO and passive polymers also hold promise in the field of micro-photonics. We will present our results on polymer micro-ring resonators integrated with polymer waveguides. Coupled micro-resonators can be used for wide-band tuning of lasers based on the vernier effect. These coupled resonators have been both voltage and thermally tuned. The measurements on a tunable laser based on the coupled resonators and EDFA that tunes over 35 nm will be presented.