Printable planar lightwave circuits with a high refractive index

Abstract

We report a novel nanofabrication method to fabricate printable integrated circuits with a high refractive index working in the visible wavelength range. The printable planar ligthwave circuits are directly imprinted by ultra-violet nanoimprinting into functional TiO2-based resist on the top of planar waveguide core films. The printed photonic circuits are composed of several elementary components including ridge waveguides, light splitters and digital planar holograms. Multi-mode ridge waveguides with propagation losses around 40 dB cm−1 at 660 nm wavelength, and, on-chip demultiplexers operated in the visible range with 100 channels and a spectral channel spacing around 0.35 nm are successfully demonstrated.