Planar lightwave circuit platform with coplanar waveguide for opto-electronic hybrid integration

We propose a planar lightwave circuit (PLC) platform constructed on a silica-on-terraced-silicon (STS) substrate for opto-electronic hybrid integration. This platform consists of an embedded silica PLC region, a terraced silicon region for optical device assembly, and a high-speed electrical circuit region. In the electrical circuit region, the coplanar waveguides (CPW) are prepared on a thick-silica/silicon substrate. This structure reduces the propagation loss of the CPW drastically to 2.7 dB/cm at 10 GHz, because the loss tangent (tan /spl delta/) of the dielectric constants of silica is much smaller than that of silicon. In order to study the feasibility of this PLC-platform for multi-gigabit operation, we used it to fabricate an LD module in which an LD chip and LD-driver integrated circuits (IC) are assembled on the PLC-platform. A bit error rate measurement of this LD module in a 2.5 Gb/s NRZ showed that this platform is applicable to multi-gigabit optical signal processing.