Fabrication of buried channel optical waveguide splitter

Abstract

An electric field technique was developed to fabricate buried channel waveguides on optical glass. A voltage of 800 V was applied on the glass to accelerate the field-driven ion exchange process by expeditiously replacing host sodium ions in the glass with silver ions. As a result, the optical loss for channel waveguides was measured using the edge coupling technique with a He-Ne laser. Loss of 0.35 dB/cm was obtained for the channel waveguides with 25 μm in depth, which is relatively low for waveguides of such depth at red wavelength band.