Design, fabrication and characterization of arrayed waveguide grating devices based on different polymers

1 × 8 and 1 × 16 traditional/saddle arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) devices with different core layer materials applied in fiber Bragg grating (FBG) system were designed, fabricated and compared. We applied epoxy resin-type materials (SU-8) and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) as the core layer materials, and polymer polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) was selected as the cladding material. We developed a chemical modification method in order to improve the film-forming properties of the core layer materials on the PDMS cladding layers. The dimensions of the fabricated AWGs with SU-8 core layers and PMMA core layers were smaller than 1.1 cm × 0.9 cm and 1.1 cm × 1.2 cm, respectively. According to the experimental results, the on-chip insertion losses of 1 × 8 and 1 × 16 SU-8 AWG devices were lower than those of PMMA AWG devices with the same type of arrayed waveguides and the number of input and output channels, with 2.83-dB and 2.26-dB lower values of the 1 × 8 and 1 × 16 SU-8 AWG devices, respectively.