Design and fabrication of the GaAs integrated optical chip for fiber optical gyroscope

Abstract

An integrated optical chip for fiber optical gyroscope (FOG) is designed and fabricated on GaAs. To achieve a high modulation efficiency and a small chip size, a deeply etched waveguide structure is employed, and accordingly a multimode interference (MMI) coupler is used as the 1 × 2 power splitter. The size of the chip is about 8.5 mm × 0.5 mm, which is much smaller than that of LiNbO₃-based chips. The experimental results show that the extinction ratio (ER) of the TE mode to the TM mode is over 26 dB and the value of V_π·L of the phase modulators is 18 V · cm. The method to further lower V_π is discussed.

Keywords

GaAs / Extinction Ratio / Power Splitter / Output Optical Power / Fiber Optical Gyroscope

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