Highly flexible polymeric optical waveguide for out-of-plane optical interconnects.

In this paper, we reported high speed optical test on polymeric optical waveguide array with embedded 45 masculine micro-mirrors on flexible substrate for out-of-plane optical interconnects. The waveguide array was bent with curvature ranging from 61 mm to 5mm. As the bending radius decreases, the average insertion loss increases from 3.4 dB to 7.7 dB for single-mode fiber (SMF) coupling and from 5.5 dB to 7.9 dB for multi-mode fiber (MMF) coupling, respectively. Eye-diagrams under such bending conditions show that the Q factor decreases from 8.0 to 6.1 and the calculated bit error rate (BER) increases from 10(-16) to 10(-10) at 10 Gbps.