International standards for optical circuit board fabrication, assembly and measurement

The commercial adoption of electro-optical printed circuit board (EOCB) technology will be accelerated by the development of industrial and conformity standards for high volume fabrication, connector assembly and waveguide measurement. In this paper, we introduce international standardisation activities surrounding EOCBs and report on industrial processes developed for the high volume fabrication of complex EOCBs with embedded multimode polymer waveguides including a first connector standard for polymer waveguide termination. We focus on solving a serious historic problem with the measurement of optical waveguide systems, namely the lack of harmonised measurement conditions for optical waveguides, which to this day gives rise to strong inconsistencies in the results of measurements by different parties on the same waveguide. We report on the development of a standard to ensure repeatable measurement of optical waveguides, whereby we demonstrate how the application of a measurement identification system and proposed reference measurement conditions can bring variation in measurement results to within 5%, thereby serving as the basis for a formal reliable optical waveguide measurement methodology.