Low Loss Polymer Optical Waveguide Replicated from Flexible Film Stamp Made of Polymeric Material

Abstract

This paper describes a flexible stamping method, which employs a flexible film stamp made of polymeric materials. Unlike conventional hard stamps, the flexible film stamp does not require either the stamp or its substrate to be perfectly flat, which means large area stamping is easy to achieve at reduced cost. We confirmed this by replicating 50 µm square multi-mode optical polymer waveguides. The propagation loss of the waveguide is only 0.06 dB/cm at a wavelength of 850 nm, which satisfies the basic requirement for optical circuit boards, and the waveguide was used to fabricate a flexible optical circuit board with mechanically transferable (MT) connectors.

Properties of Siloxane Based Optical Waveguides Deposited on Transparent Paper and Foil

“…Therefore light as a transmission medium for the future interconnections is highly desirable as it has many advantages such as higher bandwidth, immunity from crosstalk and electromagnetic interference, easy fabrication process, low cost and etc. [3], [4].…”

Optical Polymer Waveguides Fabricated by Roll-to-Plate Nanoimprinting Technique

“…Polymer-based thin-film foil waveguides fabricated by an industrial high-volume roll-to-roll embossing process were presented by Bruck et al in [ 25 ] and they obtained propagation losses lower than 1 dB∕cm for a wavelength of 633 nm. The multimode waveguides fabricated by the stamping method by Kobayashi had the propagation loss of 0.06 dB/cm at a wavelength of 850 nm [ 24 ].…”

“…These methods involve many processing steps and can lead to long fabrication times and low yield. Therefore, technologies such as the stamping methods [ 24 ] are studied for mass production. These methods include roll-to-roll (R2R) nanoimprint lithography processes [ 25 , 26 ] and also roll-to-plate nanoimprinting.…”

“…These methods involve many processing steps and can lead to long fabrication times and low yield. Therefore, technologies such as the stamping methods [24] are studied for mass production.…”

Properties of Multimode Optical Epoxy Polymer Waveguides Deposited on Silicon and TOPAS Substrate

“…Multimode polymer waveguides are a particularly attractive option for the ESR and USR communications because they exhibit favorable optical, mechanical and thermal properties allowing their direct integration onto low cost printed circuit boards with standard methods of conventional electronics manufacturing. Optical interconnects via polymer waveguides have attracted considerable attention during the last decade also because they enable fabrication of multimode optical waveguide structures on printed circuit boards [4][5][6][7][8] and flexible foil substrate using low-cost assembly and packaging methods [9], [10]. This paper presents a new approach to realize multimode polymer ridge waveguides for optical interconnection applications.…”