Fabrication of polysiloxane optical ridge waveguides for optical interconnection

Abstract

Large core and long multimode optical ridge waveguides for optical interconnection are fabricated by the soft molding and simple replication with the Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and the polysiloxane materials. Both polysiloxane materials used for the core layer and the cladding layer are low loss and high temperature stable materials. The fabrication processes is based on transferring patterns of waveguides core layer to cladding layer using an elastomeric PVDF mold. The length of fabricated waveguides is more than 20cm, and the fabricated waveguides shows the fine performance when light pass through waveguide. The optical propagation loss of waveguides is 0.14dB/cm measured by the cutback method and 0.13dB/cm measured by digital scattering method at 632.8nm. The fabricated multimode waveguide fulfils basic requirements for a successful development of large size electrical optical circuit board production