Polymer optical waveguide based bi-directional optical bus architecture for high speed optical backplane

With the technology trend of using optical interconnects as an alternative to traditional copper interconnects, basic elements such as waveguides and waveguide bus structure are studied worldwide. A novel 3-node bi-directional 50μm optical waveguide bus architecture with embedded mirrors is proposed and fabricated on flexible substrate. The fabrication is achieved by lithography-free molding. Different from other replicating methods, the mold demonstrated here is a nickel metal mold achieved by low cost electroplating and can be used repeatedly. The data transmission test up to 10Gbps using vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) has been performed to evaluate the device. The results show that the device is capable of emitting and receiving high speed data. Thus it can serve as a high performance optical backplane. Such mold fabrication technology can also be applied to smaller features size structure. The molds of 5μm wide waveguides and photonic crystal waveguide structures with 250nm hole size are fabricated and the molded structure profiles are shown.