Optical coupling devices fabricated using UV-curable resin for board level optical interconnect

Abstract

It is expected that opto-electronic printed wiring board (OE-PWB) will appear very soon. We study optical coupling schemes to multi-layer and multi-channel OE-OWB, and propose several optical coupling devices fabricated by using UV-curable resin. The “optical pin” is a vertical optical pillar, and that is one promising approach to achieve optical coupling with 90-deg path conversion between surface devices and optical wiring. Analysis using Optical Ray Tracing method shows that optical pin has potential to achieve higher optical coupling efficiency and larger positional tolerance. The optical pin can be fabricated by the Mask-Transfer Self-Written Waveguide (SWW) method using UV-curable resin. Next we propose optical coupling device with micro lens array. The advantage of using micro lens is that there will be no interaction between the beams crossings which means no crosstalk and noise will not occur. In addition, micro lens is flexible for fabrication. Starting fabrication of a single micro lens on tip of fiber, we succeeded in fabrication of micro lens array on patterned substrate.