UV-soft Imprinted Tunable Polymer Waveguide Ring Resonator for Microwave Photonic Filtering

A tunable polymer waveguide ring resonator is proposed and demonstrated for microwave photonic filtering. The ring resonator consists of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) as the tunable coupler and two micro-heaters as the thermo-optic phase shifters. It was fabricated with inorganic-organic hybrid optical material polysiloxane-liquid series by a novel and simple UV-soft selective imprint technique. The coupling conditions, over-, critical- and under-coupling, were obtained with the micro-heater on the arm of MZI and the maximum notch depth of about 18 dB was achieved. The resonant wavelength was also tuned with the micro-heater on the ring waveguide. The dispersion induced power fading of radio over fiber link was overcome by the tunable ring resonator with its notch filtering function.