Abstract

An electro-optic (EO) Mach-Zehnder modulator was fabricated from polymer materials and tested at frequencies up to 8 GHz. The device was fabricated on a Si wafer using conventional IC manufacturing equipment. Separate 50 87 microstrip electrodes were designed over each arm of the Mach-Zehnder device. Three polymer layers were deposited as shown in Fig. 1: a hard acrylate cladding layer, followed by an EO polymer from Akzo Research, bv,¹ then another cladding layer. The waveguides were photobleached² using an IC mask aligner, and microstrip electrodes was formed by gold plating. The active polymer layer was poled³ through the cladding at 70 V/ 109m for 1 min on top of a 120°C hot plate, and waveguide end faces were prepared by cleaving.

© 1991 Optical Society of America