Development of an electro-optical circuit board technology with embedded single-mode glass waveguide layer

Abstract

The goal of our research is the development of a single-mode electro-optical circuit board, the single-mode board-to-board pluggable connector and the single-mode chip-to-board coupling interface to silicon photonic devices. In this paper, the single-mode glass waveguide process is presented based on thermal silver ion-exchange for fabrication of low loss glass waveguide panels that will be developed for embedding as core layer of such printed circuit board. The single-mode glass waveguides (SM-WGs) were fabricated on 150 mm wafer size for characterization of different embedding scenarios. In the best case the measured propagation loss before and after lamination is below 0.1 dB/cm (λ=1550 nm). A suitable glass waveguide layer and embedding process was developed that can be applied for single-mode electro-optical circuit board fabrication.