Polymer based resonant waveguide grating photonic filter with on-chip thermal tuning

In this paper, we present the development of a multilayer polymer resonant waveguide grating (RWG)-based optical filter with an integrated microheater for on-chip thermal spectral tuning. RWG optical filter is fabricated using polymer-based materials. Therefore, its integration can be applied to different material platforms. Typical RWG structure is sensitive to back optical reflection from the structures below. To reduce the effect of back reflection from the metal heater and improve the quality of the integrated RWG filter output, an intermediate absorption layer was implemented utilizing an epoxy based carbon coating. This approach effectively suppresses the background noise in the RWG characteristics. The central wavelength of the reported filter was designed around 1550 nm. Experimentally, wavelength tuning of 21.96 nm was achieved for operating temperature range of 81 °C with approximately 150mW power consumption. Based on the layer-by-layer fabrication approach, the presented thermally tunable RWG filter on a chip has potential for use in low cost hybrid communication systems and spectral sensing applications.