ABSTRACT
With respect to sensing applications, integrated optics plays very different roles, depending on the features that are most beneficial for the application aimed at. In one type of application, the key role of integrated optics is to read out the signal from external transducers and to provide optical signal processing. Well-known examples are displacement and rotation sensors (the optical gyroscope) [1-4 (Vol.4,Chap.11)], where an integrated optical (IO) circuit, attached to an external transducer, is used to obtain a linear or angular position signal. Similarly, an IO chip can be used for reading out polarization-sensitive transducers or as (pre-)processing circuits for metrology measurement techniques based on interferometers [1,2,4 (Vol.2),5],
