Fabrication and characterization of an electro-optic polymer waveguide modulator for photonic applications

A polymeric Mach-Zehnder waveguide modulator has been designed, fabricated, characterized, and optically and electrically packaged for photonic applications. The polymers used in this work were PMMA-based side-chain polymers with nonlinear optical molecules, 4-dimethyl-amino-4'-nitro-stilbene. The vertical waveguide structure was made by a triple stack, and the the lateral waveguide structure was defined using photobleaching and poling. The half-wave voltage of the packaged modulator is 9 V, the extinction ratio is 31 dB, and the fiber-to-fiber optical loss is 13.2 dB. Details of the design considerations, fabrication parameters, and optical performance are presented. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science S.A.