Naru Yasuda

Replicated polymer optical waveguides

A novel replication technology for fabricating polymer optical waveguides has been developed and named as SPICA (Stacked Polymer optical IC/Advanced). SPICA is superior to current semiconductor fabrication technology because it satisfies the needs of low-cost and high-volume manufacturing. Furthermore, SPICA can be processed and packaged much like as IC devices by using planar fabrication and batch processing. Using SPICA, a single-mode optical waveguide has been fabricated the optical characteristics of which include insertion loss of less than 0.2 dB/cm. Other functional devices, such as a coupler, tap-coupler, optical switch, VOA (Variable Optical Attenuator) and optical transceiver, were also successfully fabricated.