Design and fabrication of polymer-based 1 × 4 Y-branch splitters

A polymer-based Y-branch splitter chip has been designed and fabricated in this work. Fiber-waveguide coupling loss, propagation loss as well as bending loss are considered in the design to optimize the overall performance. A simple UV-based soft nanoimprint lithography (Soft UV-NIL) technique is adopted in the fabrication. Fluorinated acrylate resins produced by ChemOptics with different refractive indices are used. Residual layer and waveguide deformation are improved via controlling fabrication processes. An average 11.28 dB insertion loss is obtained for 1 × 4 splitters with a 1.73 dB uniformity, 0.06 dB polarization dependent loss (PDL). The validity of the polymer optical splitters fabricated through Soft UV-NIL technique is demonstrated by software simulation as well as experimental works.