Abstract
Polymer materials offer a number of interesting features for the fabrication of optical waveguides. Potential applications and market opportunities continue to grow for low cost, reliable, passive and active components for telecommunication and data-communication. Organic polymers have attracted a lot of attention due to their ease of fabrication and structural flexibility. These are important factors with regard to their use as packaging and optical interconnects. In addition, the thermo-optic (TO) coefficient of polymers is an order of magnitude larger than that of silica glass and some non-aromatic polymers have very low birefringence. These are desirable characteristics in terms of their application to such optical integrated devices as TO switches. The applications for polymer waveguides are therefore divided into two categories. The first comprises optical packaging and interconnects and the second, optical integrated devices. This paper presents the requirements for polymer waveguides and describes some work which was carried out with our materials and fabrication technique.
