Design of an optical to microwave converter based on electro-optic polymer material

The purpose of this paper is to present the design of an electro-optic polymer traveling-wave waveguide photodetector operating in the 1.55 μm wavelength optical telecom window; this component seems to be completely new. Thanks to equal light and microwave speeds in the polymer material waveguides, microwave photonic mixing at frequencies as high as 60 GHz should be reached by the traveling-wave device. The component is based on three waves mixing technique; therefore it is a band-pass photodetector. The physical effect of the three waves mixing will be analyzed, and then a design of the component will be proposed.