<title>Polyguide polymeric technology for optical interconnect circuits and components</title>

Abstract

The expanding information revolution has been made possible by the development of optical communication technology. To meet the escalating demand for information transmitted and processed at high data rates and the need to circumvent the growing electronic circuit bottlenecks, mass deployment of not only optical fiber networks but manufacturable optical interconnect circuits, components and connectors for interfacing fibers and electronics that meet economic and performance constraints are absolutely necessary. Polymeric waveguide optical interconnection are considered increasingly important to meet these market needs. DuPont's polyguide polymeric integrated optic channel waveguide system is thought by many to have considerable potential for a broad range of passive optical interconnect applications. In this paper the recent advances, status, and unique attributes of the technology are reviewed. Product and technology developments currently in progress including parallel optical ink organization and polymer optical interconnect technology developments funded by DARPA are used as examples to describe polyguide breadth and potential for manufacture and deployment of optical interconnection products for single and multimode telecom and datacom waveguide applications.© (1997) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.