Abstract
We experimentally investigate the polarization dependence of the optical properties of single-mode polymer optical waveguides. We compare two types of waveguides composed of the same polymer materials: step-index square-core waveguides fabricated using the direct curing method and graded-index (GI) circular-core waveguides fabricated using the Mosquito method. We demonstrate that the GI circular-core single-mode waveguides exhibit remarkably small dependence of optical loss on the polarization angle, which is less than 0.1 dB polarization dependent loss (PDL) at both 1310 and 1550 nm wavelengths. This steady polarization property is attributed to the material stress free to the composing polymers during the fabrication process of the Mosquito method and to parabolic GI profile formed in symmetric circular core.
Highlights
T O FURTHER increase data bandwidth in datacenters, optical interconnect technologies, which realize the low power consumption as well as high speed data transmission, are drawing much attention [1]
Multimode fiber (MMF) links have already been deployed in most datacenter networks
Longer-reach links with more than 100 Gbps-level data rate are required in large-scale datacenters, and this may no longer be achieved by the existing MMF links
Summary
T O FURTHER increase data bandwidth in datacenters, optical interconnect technologies, which realize the low power consumption as well as high speed data transmission, are drawing much attention [1]. Single-mode polymer optical waveguides have attracted much attention to work as an interface between the Si photonics chips and SMFs [2]. Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. We succeeded in fabricating single-mode polymer optical waveguides as well as multimode waveguides using the Mosquito method that we developed [7], and demonstrated the low propagation loss even at 1310/1550 nm wavelengths [8]. We demonstrated the superior optical properties of single-mode waveguides fabricated using the Mosquito method compared to the conventional direct curing method due to its perfectly symmetric circular cores [10]. The polarization dependent optical properties of GI circular-core waveguides fabricated using the Mosquito method have never been investigated.
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