An overview of sol gel guest-host materials chemistry for optical devices

This paper gives an overview of opportunities for sol-gel glass guest-host materials chemistry in the area of glass integrated optics, glass integrated optics on silicon, from the perspective of optical devices and components. Our discussion locates sol-gel glass processing among several available and competing processes such as flame hydrolysis deposition and chemical vapor deposition for producing glass optical devices and components. For the most part, these are high temperature processes. Hybrid sol-gel glass chemistry (HSGG) is reviewed as an adaptable, potentially low cost, high volume, very low temperature alternative. HSGG offers an outstanding range of materials tunable in properties from ones that are closely related to organic polymers, to ones that are indistinguishable from high temperature inorganic glasses. HSGG gives the designer material compositions and properties that can be adapted to an enormous range of photonics problems and offer a menu of photonics solutions where other materials cannot. This may be particularly attractive for their use in hybrid opto-electronic circuits. Reliability issues, packaging and interconnect challenges to the implementation of these materials are enumerated for the example of electro-optic modulation.