Design and analysis of Y-branched polymeric digital optical switch with low power consumption

A Y-branched digital optical switch (DOS) based on silicon substrate was proposed using the thermo-optic effect of polymer material and the performance of the switch was simulated. An analytical steady-state heat-conduction model is also presented. In the design, one heating electrode is used to alter the refractive index in the multimode slab region to realize the switching function. With branching angle of 0.143° and using finite difference beam propagation method (FD-BPM), the experiment results show that the switch has a low switching power of less than 1.04 mW, and the response time of the switch 3.5 ms, respectively.