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A variable optical attenuator based on optofluidic technology

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IOP PUBLISHING J. Micromech. Microeng. 18 (2008) 115016 (5pp)

JOURNAL OF MICROMECHANICS AND MICROENGINEERING

doi:10.1088/0960-1317/18/11/115016

A variable optical attenuator based on optouidic technology

Yu Hongbin, Zhou Guangya, Chau Fook Siong and Lee Feiwen
Micro/Nano Systems Initiative Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117576

Received 3 June 2008, in nal form 16 July 2008 Published 7 October 2008 Online at stacks.iop.org/JMM/18/115016 Abstract A novel variable optical attenuator based on optouidic technology has been fabricated and demonstrated. Light attenuation is caused by the optical absorbing capability of liquid and the modulation can be achieved by changing the liquid dimension in the optical transmission path. In our design, this is done by the deformation of an air-controlled membrane and its subsequent contact with a rigid plate. From the results, it can be seen that nearly 38 dB dynamic range and 0.479 dB insertion loss can be achieved and the polarization-dependent loss (PDL) is also demonstrated to be less than 0.4 dB in the whole working range. (Some gures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)

1. Introduction
The variable optical attenuator (VOA) is an optical component capable of changing the intensity of the transmitted light. It is one of the most commonly used optical components and has wide applications especially in ber-optic communications. Recently, VOAs based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology have received much interest due to advantages of large dynamic range, small footprint and easy integration [1, 2]. Many novel structures successfully demonstrated include those in which the modulation of transmission intensity is achieved either by moving a blade in or out of the optical path between the emitter and the receiver so as to change the beam transmission width or by rotating a mirror to change the direction of the reected light [3, 4]. Since most of the devices are fabricated by surface micromachining or bulk micromachining processes developed from mature silicon-based microelectronics technology, highly specialized equipments, such as deep reactive ion etcher (DRIE), lowpressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) and thermal oxidation furnace, are required. In addition, multifarious control parameters associated with these facilities must be carefully chosen and controlled to obtain the designed performance. This will largely complicate the fabrication of prototype, resulting in increased cost and development time. With the advent of optouidic technology, which integrates optics and microuidics, new possibilities for light manipulation have opened up. Due to the potential gains of low fabrication cost, high fabrication yield, short fabrication
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period, prominent tunability, recongurability and adaptability advantages as described in the literature [5, 6], optouidic technology has gained much attention from researchers around the world. Many devices have been successfully developed for microuidic dye lasers [7, 8], optical sensing [9], biological detection [10] and active light modulation applications [11]. Some new types of VOAs were also demonstrated. In these cases, the transmission magnitude is attenuated by using a liquid with refractive index higher than that of the waveguide core to directly interact with the core region, thus breaking the total internal reection (TIR) condition [12, 13, 14]. Although those VOAs demonstrate good performance, the need for the bared ber core, long period grating fabricated into the ber core and/or having additional waveguide fabrication steps, makes the fabrication process cumbersome. In this paper, a novel VOA design is presented. It is a transmission-type attenuator and the working principle is based on the modulation of both the thickness of a lightabsorbing liquid and a light-transmitting aperture. Like most devices based on optouidic technology, it can be fabricated with several lithography and bonding steps and the only materials involved are polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and SU-8 for the structure and the mold, respectively, This design, described in more detail in the following sections, facilitates the development of new devices, which usually includes prototype fabrication, testing and design optimization. A simple fabrication technique also improves the possibility of high fabrication yield and reproducibility. From the measurement results obtained and presented here, it can be
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2008 IOP Publishing Ltd Printed in the UK

J. Micromech. Microeng. 18 (2008) 115016

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Accesses for capillary tube Part 2

(a) (b)

Liquid accommodating cavity Part 3 Membrane Part 1 Cavity Microchannel

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f )

Figure 1. Schematic of the device.

seen that the resulting performance is comparable to those described in other previous works. All of these characteristics make it a potential candidate in applications such as ber to the home (FTTH) and bio-related areas.

(g)

(h)

2. Device design
(i ) (j)

Similar to most devices using optouidic technology, the main body of the device is made from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), and consists of three functional parts as shown in gure 1: (1) a deformable part, in which structures commonly used in liquid lens constitution, i.e. the deformable membrane, cavity and microchannel are fabricated into the lowest substrate, (2) a thicker PDMS substrate to act as a rigid upper cap and (3) a cavity sandwiched between parts 1 and 2 used to accommodate a light-absorbing liquid. To start with, air is rst injected into the lens cavity via the microchannel to deform the membrane into a symmetrically convex shape, given by Poissons equation [15], 2 w(r, ) = P /T , (1)

Figure 2. Process ow: (a) pattern for the microchannel, (b) pattern for the cavity, (c) PDMS coating, (d) peel-off from mold, (e) PDMS coating for the membrane, (f) oxygen-plasma-activated bonding, (g) peel-off to form part 1, (h) bond to the second PDMS substrate, (i) seal with the upper plate and (j) make accesses to each part. Table 1. Specic dimensions of the design. Part Membrane Microchannel Air cavity Liquid cavity Upper plate Size Diameter: 10 mm; thickness: 30 m Width: 500 m; depth: 80 m Depth: 180 m 15 15 2 mm3 Thickness: 4 mm

where w(r, ) is the membrane shape function, P is the air pressure and T is the membrane tension. The solution of equation (1) is w(r, ) = P a2 1 4T r a
2

(2)

where a is the radius of the membrane. As more air is injected, the light-absorbing liquid solution which lls the cavity space will be gradually displaced by the swelling membrane structure and squeezed out through the plastic tube connected to the cavity. When the deformation front of the membrane touches the bottom surface of the upper substrate, the situation changes from that of free bending to one of combined bending and contact. From the classical Johnson, Kendall and Roberts (JKR) theory, the contact surface between the membrane and the upper substrate forms a perfect circle and the free energy of the whole system consists of three parts: (1) the elastic strain energy stored in the membrane, (2) the energy of adhesion caused by contact and (3) the mechanical
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energy provided by the external air injection system. At equilibrium, the free energy should be minimized. As a result, the radius r of the contact area can be determined through performing partial differentiation of the free energy. The detailed analysis of deformation is relatively complicated and beyond the scope of this paper; more information can be found in [1618]. The detailed design dimensions of the device demonstrated in this paper are shown in table 1.

3. The fabrication process

The specic process ow is shown in gure 2. First, an SU-8 layer of 80 m thickness is spun onto a 4 inch silicon wafer. After performing standard photolithography procedures including soft bake, exposure, develop and hard bake, the molds for the cavity and microchannel components in the lens structure are patterned into the SU-8 layer. A second

J. Micromech. Microeng. 18 (2008) 115016

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Liquid outlet Air inlet

Attenuation (dB)

-10 -15 -20 -25 -30 -35 -40 0 200 250 400 600 800

(a)

(b)

Figure 3. Fabricated device working at two different states: (a) small membrane deformation (before contact with the upper plate) and (b) large deformation (after contact with the upper plate).
Device Fiber coupler

Air volume injected (l)

Beam splitter

Figure 5. Attenuation as a function of the air volume injected.

Incident light
Paddle polarization controller Syringe pumping system

Tunable laser

Power meter

(
(a) (b)

Figure 4. Schematic of the test setup.

100 m thick SU-8 layer is added to increase the height of the cavity via the same processes as those of the rst layer. Both layers are then combined to act as the master mold for the subsequent PDMS casting process, in which a 3 mm thick layer of PDMS is evenly poured onto the mold and then peeled off. Oxygen-plasma-activated bonding is needed to bond the PDMS substrate onto a 30 m thick PDMS membrane, which had already been spun onto another silicon wafer. Another PDMS substrate with a through square opening punched into it is used to dene part 3 (as mentioned above), while a third PDMS substrate is kept intact to serve as the rigid upper plate. Finally, all the three parts are adhesively bonded followed by manual drilling of holes to create access. Figure 3 shows the fabricated completed working device at two different states of membrane deformation. (A red dye solution is used to ll the liquid cavity for visualization purposes.)

Figure 6. Schematic of the device operation: (a) modulation of the liquid layer thickness in the vertical direction and (b) modulation realized in the lateral direction.

4. Results
To assess the devices performance, it is inserted into the optical path of a laser beam. The intensity indicates that the device transmitted for different device working stages (i.e. the air pressure applied) is recorded and the attenuation magnitude computed. The results are shown in gure 4. From theoretical analysis, the maximum pressure required to be applied on the membrane during device actuation is only 6.25 Pa. To obtain sufcient resolution over this relatively small range, a programmable uid injection system with 1 l resolution at a constant velocity as low as 100 l min1 is used to control the volume of air pumped into the lens cavity. It is obvious that the chamber pressure will increase with increasing
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air volume introduced into a hermetic space. As a result, the membrane can be deformed to different extents accordingly. Since it is difcult to accurately measure the chamber pressure in situ, the resulting attenuation, which is converted from the recorded light intensity, is expressed as a function of the air volume rather than the air pressure in gure 5. From gure 5, which is for an optical input signal with a wavelength of 1550 nm, it can be seen that a minimum attenuation of 38 dB can be achieved at the initial stage. This is because the membrane is at as no air is introduced into the lens cavity and no light-absorbing liquid has been squeezed out. As a result, the light-absorption length by the liquid is at its peak value, thus transmitting minimal light through the device. With the injection of air, the membrane is deformed upward and this causes more liquid to be removed gradually from the optical transmission path as shown in gure 6(a). During this stage, until the air volume gets around 250 l, a linear modulation of attenuation with 0.1226 dB l1 rate can be achieved. After this point, the attenuation modulation deviates from linearity and its rate decreases with further introduction of air. This turning point corresponds to the time when the membrane makes contact with the upper plate as mentioned above. At this stage, as shown in gure 6(b), since there is no liquid remaining in the contact region between the membrane and the upper plate, the optical input signal can only be partly attenuated by the absorption of light by the liquid around this area. As a result, the intensity of transmission is modulated mainly by controlling the liquid dimension perpendicular to

J. Micromech. Microeng. 18 (2008) 115016

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Polarization dependent loss (dB)

RMS error (dB)

0.3

0.015

0.2

0.010

0.1

0.005

0.0

0.000 -40

-35

-30

-25

-20

-15

-10

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-5

-10

-15

-20

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Attenuation (dB)

Attenuation (dB)

Figure 7. Measurement of PDL.

0 -4 -8

Figure 9. Results of optical repeatability with respect to optical attenuation at 1550 nm wavelength.

Attenuation (dB)

-12 -16 -20 -24 -28 -32 -36 1520 1540 1560 1580 1600 1620

dates. The root-mean-square (RMS) error of the measured attenuation for an incidence beam at 1550 nm wavelength, as shown in gure 9, is chosen to demonstrate the stability of the device. It is clear that the device shows good optical repeatability across the entire working range with the RMS error remaining less than 0.02 dB.

5. Conclusion
In summary, a novel variable optical attenuator design based on optouidic technology has been successfully fabricated and demonstrated. The modulation of attenuation is achieved by changing the optical path length through a light-absorbing liquid brought about by the deformation of a membrane actuated by the air pressure. Results show that a dynamic range of 38 dB and an insertion loss of 0.479 dB can be achieved. A PDL value of less than 0.4 dB is realized in the whole working range. The extent of WDL found to be 1.8 dB. It is to be noted that in order to facilitate the verication of the feasibility of this design concept, it is designed such that an additional pneumatic control system is needed to actuate the device. Based on the experimental results obtained, it is envisaged that a device integrated with the actuator, such as a thermal actuator, will be eventually developed. At the same time, with the development of pressure sensors such as those described in [19, 20], it is also possible to integrate them into the device to provide more accurate in situ control over the device operation. Consequently, it can be expected that the cost of the whole device will be brought down by adopting this design concept. Another point that needs to be made is that in addition to ease of fabrication, potential low cost and comparable performance with MEMS counterparts, it is very easy to design and fabricate devices with different performances to meet the requirements of different applications by simply changing the component dimensions.

Wavelength (nm)

Figure 8. Measured WDL for the fabricated device.

the transmitting direction rather than in the parallel direction as in the previous stage. The maximum attenuation is limited to 0.479 dB because of the absorption of PDMS at this spectrum and the background noise oor of the detector. Another important performance indicator, VOApolarization-dependent loss (PDL), is provided in gure 7, in which the polarization of the transmitted light is changed by means of a paddle polarization controller; the maximum output power difference is chosen for demonstration. It is obvious that our device exhibits good PDL performance with values of less than 0.4 dB in the whole working range. The wavelength-dependent loss (WDL) is studied by using a tunable laser to scan in the spectrum region, from 1520 nm to 1620 nm. Figure 8 shows that the WDL increases with the attenuation and has a maximum of 1.8 dB. As analyzed above, the optical input signal is attenuated by absorption by the liquid located in the transmission path. The liquid adopted in this paper is deionized water and it has different absorption coefcients in this spectrum. The thicker the water layer in the cavitywhich corresponds to higher attenuationthe larger the difference in attenuation. This can be improved by using other liquid-light absorbers with a smaller absorption difference. All of the results presented above are taken from the average data of 10 measurements performed at different
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Acknowledgment
Financial support by the Ministry of Education (MOE) Singapore AcRF Tier 1 funding under grant no. R-265-

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000-235-112 and R-265-000-211-112/133 is gratefully acknowledged.

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