Photo-bleached polymeric directional couplers: Design fabrication and evaluation

Polymer devices are suitable for high-speed high-density optical interconnects due to their flexibility of fabrication and the possibility to form multilevel devices. Among the techniques of forming channel waveguide in polymer thin films, photobleaching is attractive due to its ease of processing and the low cost. We have investigated the photobleaching technique for defining channel waveguides in both the side-chain polymer PMMA/DR1 and the polyimide-based chromophore-doped ULTEM/DEDR1 to obtain optimum processing parameters. Broadband visible-UV photobleaching at elevated temperature is most efficient and has been used in the PMMA/DR1 directional coupler fabrication. We have fabricated sets of passive polymeric directional couplers with different interaction lengths