Organic materials can exhibit excellent optical, electro-optical and electro- mechanical properties, tailorable by chemical synthesis, as well as important processing advantages over their inorganic counterparts. They are therefore very interesting candidates for integration into hybrid silicon chip designs with potential implementation in a wide range of technologies.
In photonic technologies, embedding photonic functionalities on a chip can significantly reduce the size and complexity of a conventional system. Here, the inclusion of soft organic materials – particularly electroactive polymers and liquid crystals – paves the way for improved or even new functionalities by exploiting the flexibility and tunability of the properties of these materials. In micro-optical technologies, the use of soft organic materials enables solutions for parameter tuning in miniaturized dynamic microsystems, allowing such systems to become highly scalable for appropriate optical geometries.
The talk will discuss some promising soft organic materials, on-chip functionalities and technological approaches. The focus will be on examples of devices fabricated on silicon wafers – developed by the authors – whose parameters can be varied by embedded elements of electroactive materials. In this context, reconfigurable devices based on liquid crystal waveguides and their combination with various passive waveguide devices, variable-focus microlenses with built-in polymer actuators, and polymer-based energy harvesters will be presented. A variety of design solutions will be addressed for potential applications ranging from optical telecommunications to biomedical instruments.