Effects Of Rapid Thermal Annealing On Aluminum Nitride Waveguides

The effects of rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on aluminum nitride (AIN) waveguides were investigated. For the AIN prepared by the sputtering, high temperature annealing for too long time may deteriorate the device performance, while a 6-7 times RTA with a 60 s annealing at a temperature of 800 degrees C would result in a lowest waveguide loss of about 0.76 dB/cm. After annealing, self-pumped tour-wave mixing was performed on an 8(X)-nm-wide, 5.8-mm-long waveguide. With a pump beam launched into the waveguide, signal and idler sidebands can he generated, which shows that RTA assisted sputtering grown AIN can have a potential to be applied for optical frequency comb generation. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement