Abstract

An essential component of any fiber optic network is a 2×2 crosspoint switch (1,2). Advanced organic thin film materials have shown great promise for potential applications for photonics (3). In particular, second order nonlinear polymers have demonstrated their utility in Mach-Zehnder modulators (4-7). This paper reports progress toward a 2×2 crosspoint switch using a poled electro-optic polymer to achieve switching in an active evanescent coupler. (8) This effort came as a result of a need to develop switching for composite-embedded fiber optic data links (9, 10, 11) in avionics. The active electro-optic evanescent coupler is depicted below in Figure 1.

© 1993 Optical Society of America