A polymer PLC platform with a fiber-alignment V-groove for a low-cost 10-GbE WWDM transmitter

To provide a low-cost 10-Gb/s-ethernet wide-wavelength-division-multiplexing transmitter, a fiber-alignment V-groove and electrodes for laser-diode bonding are monolithically integrated with a 4-to-1 multiplexer on a polymer planar lightwave circuit (PLC). The fabricated PLC has a low insertion loss, less than 7.0 dB, including intrinsic splitting loss of 6 dB and excess loss due to the passive alignment of a single-mode fiber. The wavelength dependence of the loss is small (i.e., loss variation less than 0.3 dB), and the difference between the losses of the channels are also low (0.3 dB).