7 - Design and fabrication of multimode polymer waveguides for optical interconnects

Abstract

Over the last 40 years, polymer optical waveguides have been a prospective passive optical component, although a wide variety of applications of polymer waveguides as an active device have been proposed. The major applications as a passive component has been optical links on Since the late 1990s, multimode fiber (MMF) links combined with GaAs-based vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) have drawn much attention for computer-coms. Originally, modal dispersion of MMFs were a big technical issue for updating the bit-rate of MMF links over 10Gbps, the development of a new MMF with low dispersion currently allows even 25Gbps optical links combined with a specific launch condition. These MMF links are widely deployed in data center networks to realize rack-to-rack optical interconnects. Then, the optical links are gradually penetrating into on-board areas, so the polymer optical waveguides are expected to be integrated on board, and connected with MMFs. Thus, in this chapter, multimode polymer waveguides are focused on, and the design and fabrication for low-loss, low-crosstalk, and high bandwidth density multimode polymer optical waveguides are discussed.