A Review on Materials for Integrated Optical Waveguides

To meet the expected future requirements, optical devices are required for ultrafast and ultrahigh bandwidth communication and computing. These optical devices are capable of overcoming the bottleneck imposed by the limited bandwidth of electronic circuits in the areas like data storage, computing, or telecommunication networks (Selvaraja and Sethi in Chapter 6: review on optical waveguides. IntechOpen, 2018). The optical waveguide is the basic element of any optical circuits. Waveguides permit the optical connection of different devices. Integrated optical waveguides with light confinement in size of the order of the wavelength are required to build integrated optical circuits that substitute micro-electronic circuits. There are several materials available for waveguide design. This paper is an overview of the various waveguide materials.