Laboratories Planar Lightwave Circuit

Planar Lightwave Circuit Laboratory

The Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC) Laboratory facilitates complete in-house design, growth, fabrication, test, trimming, and packaging of both passive and active photonic circuits such as array waveguide gratings (AWGs). Based on a flame hydrolysis deposition, the PLC laboratory is capable of producing single-mode and multimode silica waveguides on 6-inch wafers with thickness from 1 micron to 400 micron. The films can be doped with B, P, and Ge, to control the refractive index with a precision better than 10-4. Active dopants such as Er are also available. Fabrication facilities include a spin coater, a mask aligner, and a deep reactive ion etcher (ICP).

The characterization facilities in the PLC Laboratory are capable of conducting full-automatic transmission, birefringence, and polarization-dependent loss measurements for sophisticated waveguide structures such as 40-channel AWGs.

The packaging facilities and expertise include edge polishing, dicing, birefringence compensation, and fiber-waveguide bonding with an insertion loss less than 0.2 dB/channel.

The supporting equipment for the PLC laboratory includes optical spectrum analyzers, high-precision tunable lasers, optical multimeters, Er-doped ASE light sources, diode lasers (635 nm and 1550 nm), a polarization controller, high power UV light sources, a phase contrast microscope with motorized sample stages, a metricon prism coupler, a wet etching station, and simulation packages for waveguides and free-space optical elements.

Questions?

• Don Shields
• Phone: 412-624-8120
• swansoninfo@
  engr.pitt.edu