Semiconductor In-line Fiber Devices for Optical Communication Systems

摘要

A high-performance optical communication system requires high- performance optoelectronic devices. The conventional approach to fabricating fiber-coupled devices involves the interruption of the fiber and the insertion of the device. Several drawbacks are associated with this approach, including high insertion loss, mechanical instability, and high packaging costs. In-line fiber devices, in which light is evanescently coupled between single mode fibers and multimode high index waveguides, offer solutions to these problems. Materials that have been used in the implementation of in-line fiber devices include liquid crystals, electro-optic polymers and lithium niobate substrates. Gallium arsenide and other compound semiconductor devices offer significant advantages over the above materials in that they can be monolithically integrated with lasers and high-speed electronics, thereby reducing fabrication costs. In addition, the sharp index contrast between the semiconductor and the fiber leads to wavelength-selective coupling, which can be exploited for WDM applications. The goal of this project is to demonstrate various compound semiconductor in-line fiber devices. The operation of these devices requires evanescent wave coupling, and hence phase-matching, between a side-polished single mode fiber and a high-index semiconductor waveguide. The large index contrast between the semiconductor and the fiber can be overcome by the use of dielectric mirrors in the semiconductor waveguide. The mirrors can be designed to provide high reflection for a specific mode angle, therefore the optical wave inside the semiconductor waveguide can propagate with an effective index much lower than the material index. This class of optical waveguides, where guiding is achieved by reflections from dielectric mirrors rather than total internal reflection at dielectric interfaces, is commonly referred to as anti-resonant reflecting optical waveguides (ARROW).