Fabrication and Characterization of Non-Doped SiO2 Cladding Layer for Polarization-Insensitive Silica Waveguide by Using Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition

概要

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We developed a technique for fabricating the cladding layers of silica waveguides and used this technique to fabricate an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG). The technique consists of two deposition process of non-doped SiO2. The first deposition process is a two-step deposition process combining plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) using tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS) gas with an etching-back non-doped SiO2 by RF sputtering, and the second is a deposition process by means of PECVD using SiH4 gas. The non-doped SiO2 cladding layer must meet requirements of a thickness over 10 μm without cracking and a refractive index the same as that of fused silica. By using this fabrication technique, these requirements are satisfied and narrow core-to-core gaps are successfully filled with non-doped SiO2 without producing voids. The developed silica waveguide with non-doped SiO2 cladding has a propagation loss of 0.07 dB/cm and the developed AWG has a polarization sensitivity of 0.001 nm, which is one order of magnitude lower than that of existing AWGs.
Published by the Japan Society of Applied Physics through the Institute of Pure and Applied Physicsの論文
2003-07-15