Patterning of inorganic polymer glass waveguiding films by dry etching

Abstract

Polymer waveguides have long been of interest for low cost integrated optical devices. Inorganic Polymer glasses are a class of materials based around polysiloxanes which have many attractive features for low cost integrated optics and meet the stringent reliability requirements for deployment in carrier networks. The inorganic polymer glasses available for this work are normally patterned as negative photoresists but this leads to a resolution limit on the achievable feature size due to free radical diffusion. Therefore we demonstrate here high quality dry etching of these materials using standard photoresist masking and the fabrication of small high index contrast waveguides with losses marginally higher than the intrinsic materials losses.

Low loss high index contrast nanoimprinted polysiloxane waveguides

“…However the relatively low index contrast precludes bend radii below 1cm severely limited the compactness of fabricated devices. Additionally there are known problems in fabricating structures much smaller than about 5m with the UV cure process in Polysiloxanes [8], leaving plasma etching as the only demonstrated route [9]. The plasma etching route, whilst simpler than that for a comparable silica waveguide structure, is capital, consumable, and time intensive compared to the UV cure method.…”