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In this paper, high-speed optical ribbon couplers for card-to-backplane interconnect applications are presented. The ribbon couplers are based on evanescent coupling between flexible multimode waveguide arrays. A soft lithographic technique is utilized to fabricate the ribbons. A flexible nonterminating optical data bus has been developed. Using BeamPROP software, we simulated the evanescent light coupling between two closely spaced ribbon waveguides to study the effects of waveguides separation, interaction length, and misalignment on coupling efficiency. Further experimental analysis and tests have been performed to quantify these effects. To investigate data transmission performance, a 12-channel optical interconnect link has been assembled. Experimental results demonstrated successful evanescent coupling; facilitating auto alignment coupling between card and backplane ribbon waveguides at data speeds as high as 10 Gb/s per channel. The evident high-speed interconnect performance and rapid ribbon prototyping approach can result in overall lower cost coupler fabrication for prospective optical interconnect applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We report on a novel vacuum-assisted microfluidic (VAM) technique for guided wave device fabrication. Ultraviolet curable resins were used to demonstrate the effective VAM waveguide fabrication. Comparisons to a conventional soft molding technique demonstrate that the VAM approach results in lower propagation losses, lower crosstalk, and improved waveguide structures. More importantly, microscope analysis portrays improved device formation, sidewall edges, and the elimination of the polymer background residue inherent to traditional soft molding fabrication techniques. As a low-cost rapid prototyping technique, the VAM soft lithographic method allows guided wave devices to be implemented rapidly and inexpensively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We report a 1 times 4 wavelength reconfigurable photonic switch based on thermally tuned microring resonators (MRs) fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator substrate. The high refractive index of silicon facilitates the formation of highly confined optical waveguides and MRs. With a fabricated ring diameter of about 10 mum, the MRs support 18-nm free-spectral range and 0.15-nm resonant spectral linewidth. Many wavelength channels can be selected through local thermal tuning of resonators for reconfigurable switching and wavelength-division multiplexing/demultiplexing. The switch response time is about 1 ms. The results suggest the feasibility of high port-count photonic circuitry with dynamic wavelength reconfiguration capability for the development of large-scale integrated photonics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]