Electrooptical Applications

Abstract

An overview of organic electronic electrooptic materials and the applications of those materials in prototype devices is given. This overview is set in the context of competing technologies. Quantum and statistical mechanical theoretical methods have recently provided significantly improved guidance in understanding organic electrooptic material structure/function relationships, leading to the systematic increase in electrooptic activity of such materials to values 15 times larger than the current commercial standard lithium niobate. In addition to discussion of electro‐optic activity, auxiliary properties of bandwidth, optical loss, thermal stability, photochemical stability, mechanical properties, and processability are discussed. Since the year 2000, substantial advances have been achieved in the processing of organic electrooptic materials and the integration with disparate materials, e.g., silicon photonics. For example, cycloaddition reactions have been employed to dramatically improve the thermal and photochemical stability of organic electrooptic materials. Integration of organic electrooptic materials with silicon photonic device structures have lead to new performance records, device concepts, and paves the way for the chipscale intergration of electronics and photonics. The fabrication of conformal and flexible devices have also been demonstrated with organic electrooptic materials and such materials have been amenable to production of complex photonic circuitry by nanoimprint/soft lithography techniques.