Fabrication and characteristics of thin-film optical switches using fluorinated silicon oxide deposited by a liquid-phase technique

Abstract

Optical switching devices have been studied using thin-film optical waveguides with fluorinated silicon oxide (SiOF) films deposited by a liquid-phase deposition (LPD) technique. This report focuses on the structure of the thermo-optical (TO) switch and its optimization. TO devices with double-and triple-layer structures were fabricated using a material with an organic spin-on-glass (SOG) cladding layer and a liquid-phase deposited (LPD) SiOF core layer. The maximum extinction ratio of 15.97 dB was obtained for the double-layer structure TO devices at the half-wavelength power of 2.78 W, and at the heater area of 0.02 mm². The response time decreased with decrease in the heater area for both double-and triple-layer structures. The response time as short as 6.3 ms was obtained at the heater area of 0.02 mm² for the double-layer structure. For the triple-layer structure, an even shorter response time of 2ms was achieved at the heater area of 0.08 mm², and this was over one order of magnitude smaller than that for the double-layer structure at the same heater area (280 ms).