
Proceedings Paper
Towards high-rate fabrication of photonic devices utilizing a combination of roll-to-roll compatible imprint lithography and ink jet printing methodsFormat | Member Price | Non-Member Price |
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Paper Abstract
Traditionally, polymer photonic devices are fabricated using clean-room processes such as photolithography, electron
beam lithography, reactive ion etching (RIE) and lift-off methods etc, which leads to long fabrication time, low
throughput and high cost. We describe in this paper a novel process for fabricating polymer photonic devices using a
combination of imprinting and ink jet printing methods, which provides high throughput on a variety of rigid and
flexible substrates with low cost. Particularly, we demonstrate a thermo-optic switch and an electro-optic modulator. In
the rib waveguide patterning, the imprint lithography transfers the waveguide pattern from a soft mold to UV-15LV
bottom cladding layer. The soft mold is replicated from a silicon master mold and rendered hydrophobic to ensure
successful de-molding. Ink jet printing method is used to deposit the core layer in thermo-optic switch and electrode
layers in electro-optic modulator. Compared to spin-coating method, the use of print-on-demand method greatly reduces
material consumption and process complexity. Every step involved has the potential to be fully compatible with roll-toroll
(R2R) volume production. For example, the soft mold can be wrapped around a cylinder to realized roll-to-roll
imprinting. By combining R2R imprint lithography with ink jet printing, fabrication of large volume and large area
multi-layer polymer photonic devices can be realized.
Paper Details
Date Published: 5 March 2013
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8613, Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics VI, 86131H (5 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2005132
Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8613:
Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics VI
Georg von Freymann; Winston V. Schoenfeld; Raymond C. Rumpf, Editor(s)
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8613, Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics VI, 86131H (5 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2005132
Show Author Affiliations
Xiaohui Lin, The Univ. of Texas at Austin (United States)
Tao Ling, Univ. of Michigan (United States)
Harish Subbaraman, Omega Optics, Inc. (United States)
Tao Ling, Univ. of Michigan (United States)
Harish Subbaraman, Omega Optics, Inc. (United States)
L. Jay Guo, Univ. of Michigan (United States)
Ray T. Chen, The Univ. of Texas at Austin (United States)
Ray T. Chen, The Univ. of Texas at Austin (United States)
Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8613:
Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics VI
Georg von Freymann; Winston V. Schoenfeld; Raymond C. Rumpf, Editor(s)
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