Polymer optical interconnect technologies for polylithic gigascale integration

Polymer optical waveguides embedded within buried air-gap cladding regions are presented as part of a wafer-level packaging technology for polylithic integration of optical interconnection with CMOS microelectronics. Functional 5 /spl mu/m wide/25 /spl mu/m pitch optical channels with dielectric/air core/cladding regions exhibit 0.43-1.22 dB/cm. scattering losses for unpassivated and passivated channels. A 1/spl times/4 multimode interference (MMI) power splitter constructed from the same polymer material exhibits 0.23-1.3 dB output power non-uniformity. Volume grating couplers constructed from a second photopolymer material exhibit /spl sim/72% input coupling efficiency.