We demonstrate a novel on-board chip-to-chip optical interconnect using long-range surface plasmon polariton (LR-SPP) waveguides that feature 2.5-cm-long gold strips embedded in a low loss polymer cladding. A TM-mode vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) operating at a wavelength of 1.3 microm was butt-coupled into the waveguides in order to excite a fundamental LR-SPP mode and then the transmitted light was received with a photo-diode (PD). The waveguide width is varied in the range of 1.5-5.0 microm in order to optimize the insertion loss where the 3-microm-wide waveguide provides a minimum insertion loss of -17 dB, consisting of 6 dB/cm propagation loss and 2 dB coupling loss. An interconnect system based on the optimized waveguide with a 4-channel array is assembled with the arrayed optoelectronic chips. It shows the feasibility of 10 Gbps (2.5 Gbps x 4 channels) signal transmission indicating that the LR-SPP waveguide is a potential transmission line for optical interconnection.
We demonstrate a high bit-rate optical signal transmission by using long-range surface plasmon polariton (LRSPP) waves in a guided geometry. With a 40Gbit∕s optical communication signal, eye patterns and bit-error-rates were measured to access the quality of the transmission properties of the LRSPP mode. A thin gold strip line embedded in a low loss optical polymer supports a LRSPP mode, which propagates with a 2dB∕cm loss, and couples to standard single mode fibers at 1.55μm with a 2dB coupling loss. A 40Gbit∕s optical signal was transmitted via a 4cm long LRSPP waveguide without any distortion of the eye patterns. The experiment also showed error-free transmissions. These results indicate that the LRSPP waveguide is a potential transmission line for optical interconnections overcoming the inherent problems in electric interconnections.
We demonstrate sub-dB/cm propagation losses in polymer-based silver stripe waveguides at the wavelength of 1.31 microm. The silver stripe waveguides were fabricated in a low-loss fluorinated polymer clad. To form uniform metal stripe patterns, which are essential for reducing propagation loss, we developed a lift-off process using double layers of photoresist and SiNx. A propagation loss of less than 1.0 dB/cm was obtained with the 11- nm-thick silver stripes in the width range of 1.5 - 4.5 microm. A coupling loss of approximately 1.0 dB with a polarization maintaining single mode fiber was achieved for a width of 4.5 microm. For a width of 2.0 microm, we recorded a minimum propagation loss of 0.4 dB/cm, which is comparable with that of dielectric multi-mode waveguides.
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