Polymer-based photonic toolbox: passive components, hybrid integration and polarisation control

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Abstract
The authors showcase their polymer-based photonic toolbox with various functionalities, which can be chosen, manipulated and combined. In the category of passive components, low-loss planar waveguides, on-chip fibre grooves and integrated thin film elements can be applied for wave guiding/splitting, multiplexing etc. In particular, on-chip grooves provide secure and automatable fibre attachment with coupling loss less than 0.2 dB per facet. The toolbox also features solutions for hybrid integration with active components. Four-channel detector arrays, for example, for IEEE 100 GbE applications, with 3 dB bandwidth exceeding 25 GHz have been demonstrated. An inserted half-wave plate, together with micro-heaters can eliminate the polarisation-dependent frequency shift in a delay line interferometer, for example, for differential phase shift keying and differential quadrature phase shift keying receiver.