Graded effective index planar polymer waveguides

A dispensed polymer waveguide with a parabolic surface is shown to exhibit graded index waveguide behavior for each of the discrete vertical modes of the polymer layer due to the lateral variation of the effective indexes of the modes. Air-clad waveguide losses are less than 0.7 dB/cm. Beam propagation simulations show excellent agreement with recorded images of oscillating guided beams. These graded effective index waveguides may be useful in high-speed, large scale optical interconnections and coarse wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) integrated optics applications.