Polymers in Integrated Photonic Devices:the Challenges and Opportunities
Polymers have been considered promising materials for the fabrication of planar waveguides because of their high thermal-optical coefficient, low materials and processing cost, and high flexibility in property manipulation. Unfortunately, while polymers have been used to fabricate waveguides since the early development of planar waveguides and various polymers have been developed for the applications, they have been hampered by their high optical loss, high birefringence, and poor performance reliability, and are still in a distance from being practically and scaly used in telecommunication applications. Tremendous efforts have been made to understand and solve the problems. While the high optical loss of polymers can be reduced by replacing their C-H bond, which has the strong absorption of at telecommunication wavelength (i.e. 1550 nm), with C-F bond, and the high birefringence can be reduced by controlling molecular orientation through chemical modification and controlling materials stress through processing, it is still tough to meet the stringent requirement in telecommunication applications. The poor performance reliability of the polymer devices is even more difficult to overcome, especially, for those related to the intrinsic molecular relaxation nature of polymers. Not mentioning the impact of molecular relaxation on active photonic devices, the volume relaxation in glassy polymers, for instance, can deteriorate many passive photonic devices during their service life or storage.
Zhiyi Zhang
Institute for Microstructural Science,National Research Council Canada,1200 Montreal Road,Ottawa,Ontatio,Canada K1A 0R6
国际会议
5th International Symposium on High-Tech Polymer Materials(HTPM-V)(第五届国际高技术高分子材料学术会议)
北京
英文
122
2008-10-27（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）