Prototype of thermo-optic switch consisting of Mach-Zehnder polymer waveguide drawn by focused proton beam

三浦 健太*; 佐藤 隆博; 石井 保行; 江夏 昌志; 高野 勝昌*; 大久保 猛; 山崎 明義; 加田 渉; 横山 彰人; 神谷 富裕; et al.

no journal, , 

The Mach-Zehnder (MZ) type thermo-optic switch consisting of two MZ couplers, two phase shifting branches and a titanium thin-film heater over one branch was prototyped in this work. A MZ type waveguide pattern with a core width of 8 m and a MZ coupling angle of 2 in a PMMA film was drawn by a 1.7 MeV focused proton beam with the beam size of about 1 m and the total dose of 100 nC/mm. The titanium thin-film heater and aluminum electrodes were formed using conventional photolithography and wet-etching processes. In the operation test of the switch, a light with a wave length of 1.55 m was injected into one side of the switch through a single-mode optical fiber, and the output light from another side of the switch was observed by an IR camera with varying an electric power supplied to the heater. A switching power was estimated to be 43.9 mW for an On/Off ratio of 9.0 dB in the test. This result showed that the switching power could be reduced compared with those of commercial silica-based switches.