Design, fabrication and characterization of DWDM by sol-gel

Sol-gel method of hybrid glass fabrication is investigated. A systematic method is presented and applied towards fabricating an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG). The method includes the production of a photo-mask for obtaining the resolution of waveguide fabrication and a novel method of calculation in prism coupling method.; After a detailed review of the theory behind the design of AWGs, the parameters obtained from the sol-gel method are used towards a design of an AWG. Using the limits and variations in the sol-gel method a perturbation analysis is done to predict the output response of the device under these variations.; The dependence of the output response to all the variations are presented.; The photo-mask of an AWG layout is designed. Using the sol-gel method, the actual device is fabricated and then tested.; The measured results of the fabricated AWG are within the expected and predicted range. Good insertion loss and channel isolations have been achieved.; Moreover, a novel propagation method is presented and applied to extract propagation constants and the output profiles of integrated photonics devices without neither solving the wave equation nor using the paraxial approximation. By approximating the variation of the field to 4th order, this method is applied to the case of a sol-gel multimode planar waveguide. Propagation constants and output profiles are extracted and are in good agreement with the values obtained from the analytical method. The case of a full π circular rotation of a single mode planar waveguide is also illustrated.; Furthermore, a novel, low temperature, sol-gel method of fabrication for inorganic transparent films is proposed. Using this method, single-layer, crack free and transparent silica based films were fabricated. Fabrication of a silica sol-gel film with no doping produced single layer films with an average roughness of about 0.5 nm, for a surface area of 10 μm 2 was obtained. Titanium doped films for the purpose of the refractive index increase is also considered. The refractive index and the loss measurements for silica-titania films was 1.510 ± 0.001. The infrared absorption spectra for both silica and silica-titania films are presented. The results suggest that the densification between 100°C and 150°C produces little change in quality of the material. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...