Robbie Charters

Low loss high index contrast nanoimprinted polysiloxane waveguides

Nanoimprint lithography is gaining rapid acceptance in fields as diverse as microelectronics and microfluidics due to its simplicity high resolution and low cost. These properties are critically important for the fabrication of photonic devices, where cost is often the major inhibiting deployment factor for high volume applications. We report here on the use of nanoimprint technology to fabricate low loss broadband high index contrast waveguides in a Polysiloxane polymer system for the first time.

Direct laser writing of self-developed waveguides in benzyldimethylketal-doped sol-gel hybrid glass

The Australian Photonics Cooperative Research Center in Australia and Ministry of Information and Communication and the Brain Korea21 project in Korea financially supported this study. B-S.B. acknowledges the Australian Research Council for the award of and IREX fellowship.

High-Quality Polarization-Insensitive Polysiloxane Waveguide Gratings Produced by UV Nanoimprint Lithography

We describe the fabrication of single-mode polarization-insensitive polysiloxane channel waveguide gratings by a single-step ultraviolet nanoimprint lithography process with a polydimethylsiloxane stamp. A 10-dB deep grating response that matches the theoretically expected response at the first-order resonant wavelength was achieved in a 2-mm-long grating with no excess loss over the intrinsic material absorption. Features down to ~100 nm could be replicated using the soft stamp.

Low cost nanoimprinted polymer waveguides

We report here on the use of nanoimprint technology to fabricate low cost planar waveguides in a Polysiloxane polymer system capable of passing the stringent Telcordia environmental and reliability criteria. Low loss buried channel waveguides with core cross sections of 3 times 3 microns and a 2% refractive index contrast were fabricated on bare silicon wafers with a simple and fast four step process using a 100 mm diameter polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) stamp. The waveguides were patterned using an innovative ldquominimum fluid displacementrdquo method which eliminated the residual films often seen either side of rib like features such as the waveguide cores, and which also produced very good dimensional control of the core itself regardless of the uncured spun core layer thickness.

High index contrast polysiloxane waveguides fabricated by dry etching

The support of the Australian Research Council through its Linkage grant and Federation Fellow programs is gratefully acknowledged as well as the financial support of RPO Inc.

Patterning of inorganic polymer glass waveguiding films by dry etching

Polymer waveguides have long been of interest for low cost integrated optical devices. Inorganic Polymer glasses are a class of materials based around polysiloxanes which have many attractive features for low cost integrated optics and meet the stringent reliability requirements for deployment in carrier networks. The inorganic polymer glasses available for this work are normally patterned as negative photoresists but this leads to a resolution limit on the achievable feature size due to free radical diffusion. Therefore we demonstrate here high quality dry etching of these materials using standard photoresist masking and the fabrication of small high index contrast waveguides with losses marginally higher than the intrinsic materials losses.