High-density channel alignment of graded index core polymer optical waveguide and its crosstalk analysis with ray tracing method

We fabricate graded index (GI) multi-channel polymer optical waveguides comprised of poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA)-poly benzyl methacrylate copolymer for the purpose of achieving high thermal stability in the GI profiles. The waveguides obtained show slightly higher propagation loss (0.033 dB/cm at 850 nm) than doped PMMA based GI-core polymer waveguides we have reported, due to the excess scattering loss inherent to the mixture of copolymer and homo-polymer in the core area. In this paper, we focus on the influence of the excess scattering loss on mode conversion and inter-channel crosstalk. We simulate the behavior of light propagating inside the core with and without the scattering effect. Using the simulation, the excess loss experimentally observed in the copolymer-core waveguide is successfully reproduced, and then, we find that the excess scattering loss of 0.008 dB/cm could increase the inter-channel crosstalk from -30 dB to -23 dB which agrees with the experimentally observed value. Although the simulation of the inter-channel crosstalk was performed only on our GI-core polymer optical waveguides, it is capable of modeling the conventional SI rectangular-core waveguides. Some amount of excess scattering is generally observed in the conventional SI-core waveguides, and thus, the application of this simulation to SI-core waveguides allows a feasible design for high-density alignment of the waveguides.