Polymer materials exhibit unique properties in the fabrication of optical waveguide devices, electromagnetic devices, and bio-devices. Direct laser writing (DLW) technology is widely used for micro-structure fabrication due to its high processing precision, low cost, and no need for mask exposure. This paper reviews the latest research progresses of polymer-based micro/nano-devices fabricated using the DLW technique as well as their applications. In order to realize various device structures and functions, different manufacture parameters of DLW systems are adopted, which are also investigated in this work. The flexible use of the DLW process in various polymer-based microstructures, including optical, electronic, magnetic, and biomedical devices are reviewed together with their applications. In addition, polymer materials which are developed with unique properties for the use of DLW technology are also discussed.

Information encryption technique has broad applications in individual privacy, military confidentiality, and national security, but traditional electronic encryption approaches are increasingly unable to satisfy the demands of strong safety and large bandwidth of high-speed data transmission over network. Optical encryption technology could be more flexible and effective in parallel programming and multiple degree-of-freedom data transmitting application. Here, we show a dual-layer optical encryption fluorescent polymer waveguide chip based on optical pulse-code modulation technique. Fluorescent oligomers were doped into epoxy cross-linking SU-8 polymer as a gain medium. Through modifying both the external pumping wavelength and operating frequency of the pulse-code modulation, the sender could ensure the transmission of vital information is secure. If the plaintext transmission is eavesdropped, the external pumping light will be switched, and the receiver will get warning commands of ciphertext information in the standby network. This technique is suitable for high-integration and high-scalability optical information encryption communications.

A transparent reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) module composed of AWG-based wavelength-channel-selectors monolithically integrated with Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) thermo-optic (TO) waveguide switch arrays and arrayed waveguide true-time-delay (TTD) lines is designed and fabricated using polymer photonic lightwave circuit technology. Negative-type fluorinated photoresist and grafting modified organic-inorganic hybrid materials were synthesized as the waveguide core and cladding, respectively. The one-chip transmission loss is ~6 dB and the crosstalk is less than ~30 dB for the transverse-magnetic (TM) mode. The actual maximum modulation depths of different thermo-optic switches are similar, ~15.5 dB with 1.9 V bias. The maximum power consumption of a single switch is less than 10 mW. The delay time basic increments are measured from 140 ps to 20 ps. Proposed novel ROADM is flexible and scalable for the dense wavelength division multiplexing network.

In this work, thermo-optic tunable 4 × 4 cascaded multimode interference based integrated optical waveguide switching matrices are designed and fabricated using photopolymer lightwave circuits. The materials of the waveguide core and cladding are fluorinated epoxy-terminated copolycarbonate and polymethylmethacrylate, respectively. The driving power that controls matrices for binary encoding of different optical switching states are simulated and analyzed. The measured insertion loss of the actual chip is < 7.1 dB and the maximum crosstalk in adjacent channels is <−30 dB. The switching time is approximately 220 μs and the extinction ratio is obtained as 21.5 dB. This flexible encoding technique can be applied for achieving optical code-division multiple-access network coders.

A transparent reconfigurable optical interleaver module composed of cascaded AWGs-based wavelength-channel-selector/interleaver monolithically integrated with multimode interference (MMI) variable optical attenuators (VOAs) and Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) switch arrays was designed and fabricated using polymer photonic lightwave circuits. Highly fluorinated photopolymer and grafting modified organic-inorganic hybrid material were synthesized as the waveguide core and caldding, respectively. Thermo-optic (TO) tunable wavelength transfer matrix (WTM) function of the module can be achieved for optical routing network. The one-chip transmission loss is ~6dB and crosstalk is less than ~25 dB for transverse-magnetic (TM) mode. The crosstalk and extinction ratio of the MMI VOAs were measured as −15.2 dB and 17.5 dB with driving current 8 mA, respectively. The modulation depth of the TO switches is obtained as ~18.2 dB with 2.2 V bias. Proposed novel interleaver module could be well suited for DWDM optical communication systems.