1st IEEE British and Irish Conference on Optics and Photonics (BICOP 2018)

5 / 2018-08-17 23:44:12

Fabrication and Evaluation for Polymer Waveguide Coupler Devices Using the Imprint Method

Y branched polymer optical waveguide,Imprint Method,Beam propagation method

Along with the wide deployment of cloud computing services, the introduction of optical interconnect technology has supported the rapid growth of capacity in data center networks over the last couple of years. So far, multimode fiber(MMF)links have been widely installed in datacenter networks, hence the limitation of bandwidth distance of MMF links is a current issue. In the future, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission technology could be applied even in MMF links, by which the transmission capacity could increase by transmitting multiple optical signals with different wavelengths in one fiber.
In order to apply to the MMF WDM links as a MUX device, in this research, Y-branched polymer optical waveguide couplers with SI・GI square core are fabricated using the imprint method. In order to obtain low loss MUX device, three different Y-branch structures are designed and fabricated and their optical characteristics are compared. The loss of GI waveguide is lower than that of SI waveguide, independent of the multiplexing structure. The GI core waveguides show lower loss than the SI waveguides because the light leakage at the multiplexing point could be reduced to the core center in the GI core due to the strong light confinement effect. Moreover, under the multiplexing length from 4.800 mm to 20 mm, the GI waveguide coupler with an S - shaped multiplexing structure show lower loss than any other waveguide structures. In the case of the S-shaped coupler, an abrupt change in propagating direction (wavenumber vector) is not involved in the connection points, and thus lower loss is maintained compared to the other structures.