Electrode structure for both poling and driving of the electro-optic polymer in an analog-to-digital converter based on an optical deflector

Full optimization design of an electro-optic (E-O) deflector for a 44 giga-sample-per-second all-optical analog-to-digital converter application is reported in this paper. The E-O polymer based deflector is used for a spatial sampling of a radio frequency (RF) voltage applied through in-plane lateral configuration electrodes. The traditional poling configuration, in the metal-contact technique, by sandwiching the waveguide between a ground plane and a full plate top electrode is not adapted for chromophore orientation in lateral direction. We propose to build one set of electrodes, for both poling and driving the E-O polymer based optical deflector, by adding DC contacts for each strips via low-pass filter to avoid narrowing of the RF bandwidth. The DC poling contacts introduce only 1 dB additional insertion losses and reduce the bandwidth from 25.5 down to 21.6 GHz while the E-O effect should be increased due to the optimal chromophores orientation.