Fabrication of an optical polymer waveguide by plasma‐enhanced polymerization

We have fabricated an optical polymer waveguide using plasm‐enhanced polymerization. C 6 H 6 and C 6 H 10 are used as monomer materials for depositing core and cladding layer, respectively, because the refractive index of polymerized layers is known to dominantly depend on the ratio of sp 2 and sp 3 bond in those. By decreasing RF power below 0.04W/cm 2 , dangling bonds formed in a polymer film will be suppressed, so that a relatively low‐loss waveguide has been fabricated. We measured propagation loss of those waveguides using the end‐fire method employing laser light at a wavelength of 787 nm. The losses are 3.2cm −1 for the samples plasma‐polymerized in Ar. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 92(4): 21–28, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/ecj.10084