Year: 2012
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In-plane bend loss represents the greatest commercial inhibitor to deploying multimode optical waveguides on densely populated electro-optical printed circuit boards (OPCB) as the minimum bend radii currently possible are too large to be practical in common designs. We present a concept and fabrication method for creating novel polymer optical waveguide structures with reduced bend losses to enable higher density routing on an OPCB. These nested core waveguide structures comprise a core surrounded by a thin shell of cladding, which allows for two-fold modal containment by first a conventional low refractive index contrast (LIC) boundary followed by a secondary high refractive index contrast (HIC) boundary. The purpose of this is to reduce the in-plane bend losses incurred on tightly routed optical channels, while not incurring prohibitive dispersion, sidewall scattering and optical crosstalk penalties. We have designed and fabricated nested core multimode polymer waveguides, evaluated their performance in comparison to conventional step-index waveguides and simulated these structures using the beam propagation method. Preliminary results are presented of our measurements and simulations.
DOI: 10.1117/12.919817
Authors: Richard Pitwon, Callum Smith, Kai Wang, Jasper Graham-Jones, David R. Selviah, Markus Halter, Alex Worrall
Language: English
Topic: Photonic and Optical Devices
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1968823374