Research LabsPlanar Lightwave Circuit LaboratoryContact: Kevin P. Chen The equipment in the Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC) Laboratory facilitates complete in-house design, growth, fabrication, testing, trimming, and packaging of both passive and active photonic circuits such as array waveguide gratings (AWGs). A FHD deposition system capable of handling four-inch wafers is used to grow waveguide films with thickness from one micron to 400 micron. The films can be doped with B, P, and Ge, to control the refractive index with a precision better than 10-4; active dopants such as Er are also available. A deep reactive ion etcher is used to create ridge waveguide arrays with an etching rate up to 500 nm/minute in silica glass. Etch uniformity is better than 5 percent over a four-inch wafer with an aspect ratio better than 10:1. The etch repeatability is better than 5 percent, with 90±5ºC sidewall profile and <100 nm sidewall RMS. The characterization facilities in PLC Laboratory are capable of conducting full-automatic transmission, birefringence, and polarization-dependent loss measurement for sophisticate waveguide structures such as 40-channels AWGs. A custom built 12-axis waveguide characterization/bonding station are use to align/characterize waveguides, diffractive optical elements, and opto-electronic circuits. The motorized axes have six-inch travel distance and 0.1 µm bi-direction repeatability. The transmission and reflection characterization can be carried out in C+L band, around 1.3 micron, and around 980 nm with a resolution better than 10 pm; low-resolution transmission measurements can be carried out from 600nm to 1700nm continuously. The packaging facilities and expertise include edge polishing, dicing, birefringence compensation, and fiber-waveguide bonding with an insertion loss less than 0.2 dB/channel. The supporting equipment for the PLC laboratory includes optical spectrum analyzers, high-precision tunable lasers, optical multimeters, Er-doped ASE light sources, diode lasers (635 nm and 1550 nm), polarization controller, high power UV light sources, a phase contrast microscope with motorized sample stages, a metricon prism coupler, wet etching station, and simulation packages for waveguides and free-space optical elements. Members of PLC laboratory also have excellent access to a wide array of facilities through off-campus collaboration, these include:
 Low-loss silica waveguide deposition |
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