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.
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