Channel polymer optical waveguides embedded in glass: Design, fabrication and characterization

• Novel channel polymer optical waveguides embedded in glass have been proposed.
• Polymeric channel optical waveguides were designed, fabricated and characterized.
• Wet-etching of glass has been optimized to fabricate these optical devices.
• End-coupling technique was used to characterize the polymer optical waveguides.

In this work, the design, fabrication and experimental evaluation of new channel polymer optical waveguides embedded in glass are reported. We show that high quality microchannels in glass, without roughness on the walls, make possible the fabrication of new channel optical waveguides by filling the microchannels with a polymer. Guided light through those new optical waveguides is demonstrated experimentally. The commercial software OlympIOs was used to design multimode and monomode channel polymer optical waveguides. The microchannels in glass substrate were fabricated by using a laser lithography system and wet-etching procedures. The spin-coating technique was applied to deposit the polymer inside the microchannels. The end-coupling method was implemented for the waveguides characterization. Theoretical and experimental results have confirmed light confinement as well as guided modes propagation by these new channel optical waveguides.