Fast electrooptic Bragg grating couplers for on-chip reconfigurable optical waveguide interconnects

We present an array of electrooptic Bragg gratings for on-chip optical waveguide interconnect applications. These integrated gratings can serve as switchable couplers to couple high-speed optical signals from a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser to on-chip polymeric waveguides and from waveguides to photodetectors. The unique switching feature provides a promising solution to facilitate dynamically reconfigurable on-chip optical interconnects architecture for intrachip, chip-to-chip, and board-to-board data communications. We demonstrate electrooptic grating couplers in a polymeric channel waveguides on a silicon substrate with an electrically tunable surface-normal coupling efficiency up to 8% and a switching speed of 75 μs.