Technologies for the fabrication of photonic devices based on chalcogenide glasses

Interest in chalcogenide glasses for photonic applications has been growing vigorously, driven by the wide wavelength range of optical transparency, high linear refractive indices, large optical non-linearity and the possibility for hosting active rare earth dopants. In this paper some emerging technologies for the fabrication of planar chalcogenide glass waveguides and photonic devices are discussed. These include the hot embossing of such glasses which offers several extremely promising routes for producing high-resolution, planar guided-wave optical components and circuitry at low-cost and high-volume. Direct processing using the non-linear absorption of a tuneable femto-second laser offers unique possibilities to write highly compact photonic optical devices in three dimensions that complement the embossing approaches.