Fabrication of ridge waveguides by UV embossing and stamping of sol-gel hybrid materials

Abstract

Multimode large core (45 x 35 mum(2)) optical ridge waveguides are fabricated in the room temperature by ultraviolet (UV) imprinting of soft rubber template with the organic-inorganic sol-gel hybrid materials. The fabrication processes may be either well-known UV embossing or stamping. A new sol-gel hybrid material that is thermally stable has been developed for the fabrication of low-loss optical waveguides. The UV curable methacrylic sol-gel hybrid material is used for the core layer and fluorinated methacrylic sol-gel hybrid material is used for the cladding layer. The optical propagation loss of fabricated waveguide measured by the cutback method is 0.36 dB/cm at 850 nm and the surface roughness of waveguide is about 5 Angstrom root mean square.