Mosquito method based polymer tapered waveguide as a spot size converter

Abstract

We create a compact low-loss spot-size converter (SSC) which utilizes a tapered core polymer optical waveguide with circular cross-sectional graded-index (GI) core using the Mosquito method we developed. First, we theoretically analyze the mutual diffusion between the core and cladding monomers, which is a feature unique to the Mosquito method when forming GI cores. The monomer diffusion effect depends on the initial core diameter that is dispensed by a microdispenser and the diffusion time before UV curing: in a small core the monomer diffuses more rapidly than in a large core. Using this diffusion dependence on the initially dispensed core diameter, it is theoretically found that a tapered polymer waveguide based SSC can adiabatically convert the mode-field diameter between 4.0 and 8.6 μm at a 1550-nm wavelength waveguide as short as 4 mm. Next, the tapered waveguide based SSC with the designed structure is experimentally fabricated using the Mosquito method, and we confirm an 8-mm long tapered waveguide with an insertion loss of 1.83dB functions as a SSC that converts the MFD from 4.7 μm to 7.5 μm at 1550-nm wavelength.