Fabricação e caracterização de Guia de Onda Polimerica a base de PMMA modificado por plasma de CHF3 / Polymeric optical waveguides fabricated by plasma fluorination process

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

Polymeric optical devices have been studied in communication and interconnection optics due to the intrinsic versatility of polymers molecular structure, that allows advantageous refractive index modeling for core and cladding, and also to their easy fabrication process or patterning capability. PMMA, polymethylmetacrylate, shows the best optical properties among transparent polymers, being a very common core material for optical devices. Low refractive index is a requirement for cladding material and it is usually achieved with fluorinated polymers. Plasma of fluorocarbons are frequently used either for etching of substrates in microelectronic technologies or for deposition of plasma polymerized fluorinated monomers films. In this work, planar polymeric waveguides were fabricated on silicon substrate. The cladding was a fluorinated polymer (0.6 mm) produced by CHF3 plasma polymerisation (parallel plate reactor, 13.56 MHz) and the core was a PMMA film prepared by spin coating. The refractive index of the PMMA film and fluorinated film were 1.49 and 1.40, respectively, characterized by ellipsometry and metricon prism coupler. The plasma fluorinated optical films were characterized by FTIR-ATR and interferometer. The polymeric waveguides with different widths (from 10 to 100 mm), using the chrome mask, were patterned by UV photolithography and O2 plasma etching in Reactive Ion Etching process. The optical characterization was done coupling a laser beam (l=633nm), fibre-tofibre coupling method, using a multimode optical fibre. The propagation loss, is about 3.6 dB/cm at l=633 nm. Lower losses could be achieved by a more careful control of the RIE process and cleavage process. Despite of high optical losses, this plasma fluorinated polymer presents a potential processing alternative for cladding of polymeric optical waveguides

ASSUNTO(S)

photolitograph fotolitografia guias de ondas oticas polymeric waveguide polimerização em plasma plasma polymerization

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