For applications in high-density and high-speed optical interconnections, we propose to utilize polymer parallel optical waveguides (PPOWs) with so-called W-shaped refractive index profile in the core area. A W-shaped index profile is composed of a parabolic index distribution surrounded by a narrow index valley, followed by a cladding with a uniform refractive index. We expect that W-shaped index profiles contribute to decreasing the inter-channel crosstalk due to mode conversion in the waveguides. In this paper, we investigate how much the index difference of the index valley improves the crosstalk value. First, we fabricate polymer waveguides with various index profiles by changing the composition of the copolymer for cladding. We show the results that a 1-m long W-shaped profile PPOW has not only low propagation loss (0.027 dB/cm), but an inter-channel crosstalk (~-40 dB) lower than those of graded index (GI) core PPOW we previously fabricated. Next, we theoretically analyze the propagation loss and inter-channel crosstalk in polymer waveguides with different index profiles by means of a ray tracing model in which the light scattering effect is included. The calculation results indicate that the index valley surrounding each core works properly for preventing the power coupling from the cladding modes to the propagation modes, and consequently, very low inter-channel crosstalk is realized with W-shaped index profiles.

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