Polymer-waveguide-based optical circuit with two vertical-transition output ports realized on silicon substrate for optical interconnects

A polymer-waveguide-based optical circuit with two vertical-transition output ports for the optical interconnects is demonstrated on a silicon substrate. Such a 1 × 2 vertical splitter is realized using a polymer waveguide monolithically integrated with three silicon 45° microreflectors. The vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser chip assembled at the input port and two multimode fibers located at two output ports are arranged to demonstrate a two-port optical proximity coupling of the off-chip optical interconnects based on the proposed splitter. The optical insertion loss of -6.6 dB is experimentally obtained for the proposed 1 × 2 vertical splitter with a splitting ratio of 1.3 : 1. The clearly 10-Gb/s optical eye patterns at both output ports verify that the 1 × 2 vertical splitter is suitable for the optical interconnects with multiple output ports.