Silicon, which has been a leading material in microelectronic industry for decades, is an attracting platform for photonic Integrated Circuits ( PICs ) thanks to transparency in the most widely used telecom wavelength bands, high refractive index contrast with cladding materials (SiO2, polymers, air), well-known processing conditions and production scalability (up to 12 inch wafers). However, expensive silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers are needed to fabricate devices with moderate insertion losses.
Comparing to inorganic materials, optical polymers are inexpensive, easy to process and flexible enough to meet a broad range of application-specific requirements. These advantages allow a development of cost-efficient polymer photonic integrated circuits for on-chip optical communications, signal processing, sensing, etc.
In the last years polymer photonics is witnessing a tremendous boost in research efforts and practical applications. Polymers are relatively inexpensive, can be engineered to exhibit unique optical and electronic or mechanical properties, and have demonstrated compatibility with various patterning methods. Extremely transparent and reliable optical polymers have been made commercially available for developing customer-specific photonic devices. The processing is usually fast and cost-effective. The real fascination of Polymer based photonics is that fact that it is very low power and is capable of very high data rates – both qualities that are critically needed by the community.
However, polymer platform suffers from some drawbacks, for example, low refractive index contrast between core and cladding. This limits light confinement in a core and, consequently, integrated polymer device miniaturization. Also, polymers lack active functionality like light emission, amplification, modulation, etc.
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