Fabrication of pellicle beam splitters for optical bus application

Abstract

The optical bus architecture for on-board applications requires a number of optical splitters with precise split ratios to route part of the input signal. Since hollow metal waveguide provides well collimated beams with very small gap loss, it opens the possibility of inserting discrete optical beam splitters (taps). The optical tap requires low excess loss, polarization insensitivity, temperature stability, minimized walk-off of the propagating beam, and cost effective manufacturing. By benefiting from the mature interference coating technology for polarization insensitivity and temperature stability, we design a pellicle beam splitter based on a static microelec tro-mechanical system (MEMS) and develop processes to fabricate pellicle splitters using wafer level bonding of silicon and glass substrates, with subsequent thinning to 20 µm. With the approaches described in this paper, we have demonstrated optical beam splitters with excess loss of less than 0.17 dB that operate at a data rate of 10 Gb/s showing a clean eye diagram while providing controlled split ratio and polarization insensitivity. We have demonstrated a high yielding MEMS based silicon processing platform which has the potential to provide a cost effective manufacturing solution for optical beam splitters.