Channel Waveguides Based On Dry Etching Of Thermally Co-Evaporated Chalcogenide Films For Infrared Integrated Optics

The chalcogenide glasses are very promising materials for integrated optics in the infrared because of their exceptional transparency in this range of wavelengths. One goal of our team inMontpellier is to demonstrate the feasibility of IR micro-components by piling and drying thick layers of chalcogenide glasses, and to value it through applications such as metrology environment or special interferometry. As part of a project funded by the European Space Agency and led by Thales Alenia Space, we are currently working on making channel waveguides based on thick Te-Ge layers. In this article we describe the main stages of manufacturing: deposition by thermal co-evaporation -a method never used until now for chalcogenide materials -and geometric modification by dry reactive plasma.