International standardisation of optical circuit board measurement and fabrication procedures

Abstract

Widespread adoption of optical circuit boards will herald substantial performance, environmental and cost benefits for the data communications industry. Though optical circuit board technology has advanced considerably over the past decade, commercial maturity will be gated by the availability of conformity standards to forge future quality assurance procedures. One important prerequisite to this is a reliable test and measurement definition system, which is agnostic to the type of waveguide system under test and therefore can be applied to different optical circuit board technologies as well as being adaptable to future variants. A serious and common problem with the measurement of optical waveguide systems has been lack of proper definition of the measurement conditions for a given test regime, and consequently strong inconsistencies ensue in the results of measurements by different parties on the same test sample. We report on the development of a new measurement identification standard to force testers to capture sufficient information about the measurement conditions for a given optical circuit board such as to ensure consistency of measurement results within an acceptable margin. Furthermore we demonstrate how the application of the measurement identification system can bring about a dramatic improvement in results consistency, by comparative evaluation of the results on multimode polymer waveguide based optical circuit test boards from a large selection of testing organisations.