Rare – Earth – Doped Silicate Glass – Ceramic Thin Films for Integrated Optical Devices

The possibility to confine the light in optical planar structures represented the milestone for the development of integrated optical devices in different application areas, such as communications and sensing. In particular, rare-earth (RE) doped planar waveguides demonstrated to be an interesting solution in the realization of integrated optical lasers and amplifiers suitable for the generation/regeneration of the signal in metropolitan and local area networks. Nowadays, although these devices are commercially available, the major contribution of the research consists in discovering and developing better combinations of materials and fabrication processes, in order to reduce the costs and increase the performance of the aforesaid devices. In this context glass-ceramic waveguides, activated by RE ions, seem to fully respond to these requests. The aim of this paper is to offer a comprehensive review on the main results obtained in our Labs in the field of glassceramics. Fabrication and characterization of different silicate glass-ceramic thin films, doped with different percentages of RE ions, will be presented and discussed. The interesting results obtained make these systems quite promising for development of high performance integrated optical amplifiers and lasers.