A polymer PLC (planar lightwave circuit) platform has been developed for a 10 GbE WWDM transmitter. The waveguide of the PLC was fabricated using fluorinated polyimide with high reliability under damp-heat ambience and robustness against solder bonding. Integrating a 4-to-1 waveguide multiplexer, a fiber alignment V-groove and electrodes for LD (laser diode) bonding monolithically, the PLC platform enables a SMF (single mode fiber) and four LDs to be aligned with the waveguide by using low-cost passive alignment technique. The insertion loss of the fabricated PLC was less than 7dB, and the excess loss due to the passive alignment of a SMF was turned out to be only 0.15dB. The wavelength dependence of the insertion loss of all four channels and the difference of the loss among the channels were both less than 0.3dB. This results shows that this polymer PLC has a great potential for 10GbE WWDM application.
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