High thermally stable hybrid materials for optical interconnects

ABSTRACTOptical materials in the optical circuit board are required to overcome soldering process. In detail, the material should not have absorption and shape changes after several tens of seconds heating at around 250 °C. For such application field, we have developed a novel organic-inorganic hybrid material having a high thermal stability and low absorption at telecom wavelength.The hybrid material was designed to solvent less resin, which is free radical curable with heating at 150 °C or UV exposure at room temperature, for the sake of device fabrication activity. We demonstrated the waveguides fabrication by photolithography, and obtained high uniformity cured materials. Transparency of the waveguide sample at telecom wavelength was 0.10 dB/cm at 850 nm, 0.12 dB/cm at 1060 nm, 0.29 dB/cm at 1310 nm, and 0.45 dB/cm at 1550 nm. These values are good low attenuation for the Near-IR optical communication in optical interconnects. Without any further treatment such as post bake, the cured materials showed a high thermal stability. The temperature of 5 % weight loss was over 400 °C, and the transparency hardly changed after 1 min heating at 300 °C.In addition, the cured material showed a high refractive index of n=1.60 at 633 nm and a low curing shrinkage about 4.7 %. From these properties, the developed organic-inorganic material is expected to be beneficial for the optical interconnection such as micro lenses and optical packages.