Self-written waveguide technology with light-curable resin enabling easy optical interconnection

Optical interconnect technology has attracted much attention to solve the bottleneck of electric wiring. In order to achieve optical interconnect, several problems mainly concerning optical coupling between printed wiring board (PWB) and/or fibers. Self-Written Waveguide (SWW) method is a promising approach for solving these problems. The SWW method uses a light-curable resin and enables fabrication of an optical channel waveguide. This optical waveguide is formed like icicle from the end face of the optical fiber under irradiation with UV light. This technology inherently produces very high coupling efficiency between the fiber and fabricated waveguide core. We have extended this fiber-SWW technology into the Mask-Transfer Self-Written (Mask-SWW) method. This method involves contact exposure of UV-curable resin through a photomask, and enables mass production of “polymer optical pin” in two-dimensional array structure. Applying these technologies, several optical interconnect devices have been fabricated. In this talk, these technologies and recent works will be presented.