Compression-molded three-dimensional tapered polymeric waveguides for low-loss optoelectronic packaging

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Abstract
We report for the first time, three-dimensionally tapered polymeric waveguides fabricated by the compression-molding technique. The waveguides presented herein provide a feasible solution to bridge discrete optoelectronic devices having apertures of a few micrometers to hundreds of microns. 1-cm-long tapered channel waveguides with the end cross sections of 5 /spl mu/m/spl times/5 /spl mu/m and 100 /spl mu/m/spl times/100 /spl 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 when coupled from the large end. By confining the energy to the fundamental mode, when coupling from large end to the small end, a low-loss packaging can be achieved bidirectionally.