Synthesis And Characterization Of Polymers In Arrayed Waveguide Grating

The continual trend toward high transmission speed, data capacity, and data density in integrated circuits demands a solution to the bottleneck resulting from the limited data rate of electrical interconnects. One approach to this problem is the use of optical interconnection operating with polymer waveguides. Polymer materials have tailorable optical properties such as refractive index and optical losses, and exhibit excellent mechanical and physical properties. We focused on the following three important aspects when synthesizing our waveguide polymer: first, high transparency at both 1.3μm and 1.55μm; second, high thermal and environmental stability; last, high refractive index controllability.In this paper, we have synthesized PMMA-co-GMA polymer and characterized its optical properties. It can be used in arrayed waveguide grating fabrication. The crosslinkable polymers were prepared by copolymerization of methylmethacrylate (MMA) and glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) via the sealed-tube reactive technique. These polymers were characterized using 1H-NMR spectrum, gel permeation chromatography (GPC), differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) and in situ infrared (IR). The crosslinkable polymers have large relative molecular weight, good organosolubility, excellent film-forming property and possess high glass transition temperature after crosslinked. The refractive index of the polymer can be adjusted between 1.483 and 1.588, by doping bisphenol A epoxy. Because of three-dimensionally cross-linked structure, the birefringence of the polymer can be very low. At the same time, we have synthesized PFS-co-GMA polymer and characterized its optical properties. The crosslinkable polymers were prepared by copolymerization of 2,3,4,5,6-Pentafluorostyrene (PFS) and glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) via the sealed-tube reactive technique. These polymers were characterized using 1H-NMR spectrum, gel permeation chromatography (GPC), differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) and in situ infrared (IR). The crosslinkable polymers have large relative molecular weight, good organosolubility, excellent film-forming property and possess high glass transition temperature after crosslinked. The refractive index of the polymer can be adjusted by doping bisphenol A epoxy or copolymerization with styrene. We know that in the 1300-1600nm range, absorption comes from the overtones of fundamental molecular vibrations. Owing to their higher harmonic order, C-F overtones shoe extremely low absorption throughout the telecommunications windows. In our copolymer, the C-F volume concentrations are increased to 25%, so the optical loss, one of the biggest concerns of the polymer waveguide materials, can be reduced extremely.Polyester is one of the very useful conventional optical polymers, with its excellent mechanical properties, thermal stability and so on. But fabricating arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) with polyester, to our knowledge, were not reported. We designed and synthesized fluorinated polyester to fabrication of AWG, based on the 4,4'-(Hexafluoroisopropylidene)diphenol . We know that it is very difficult to obtain polyester with high molecular weight because of the rigorous reaction condition, such as high temperature, vacuum. We synthesized fluorinated polyester with different reaction routine and got the primary result. These polymers were characterized using gel permeation chromatography (GPC), and in situ infrared (IR). Because of the polyester we got with C-F volume concentrations are increased to 40%, the optical loss, one of the biggest concerns of the polymer waveguide materials, can be reduced extremely. We forecast it was very useful in AWG..