COMPRESSION-MOLDED 3-DIMENSIONAL TAPERED POLYMERIC WAVE-GUIDES FOR LOW-LOSS OPTOELECTRONIC PACKAGING

We report for the first time, three-dimensionally tapered polymeric wa veguides fabricated by the compression-molding technique. The waveguid es presented herein provide a feasible solution to bridge discrete opt oelectronic devices having the apertures of a few micrometers to hundr eds of microns. 1-cm-long tapered channel waveguides with the end cros s sections of 5 mu m x 5 mu m and 100 mu m x 100 mu m were fabricated, These waveguides have a propagation loss of 0.5 dB/cm when the 632.8- nm He-Ne laser Light is coupled from the small end and of 1.1 dB/cm wh en coupled from the large end. By confining the energy to the fundamen tal mode, when coupling from large end to the small end, a low-loss pa ckaging ran be achieved bidirectionally.