Abstract

The process for fabricating polymeric thin film waveguides very often involves successive spinning and curing of layers of different polymers using different solvents. Part of the material selection and waveguide design process involves the determination of the refractive indices of each polymer, often by spinning on glass or silicon substrates and using prism coupling techniques[1-3] to determine the TE and TM indices. Equally important is the determination of the refractive indices of each layer in the final multistack structure in order to verify that successive solvent exposure and curing cycles have not deleteriously affected the indices. Analysis of the prism coupling data from the multistack structure, which involves both guided- and leaky-modes and can be complicated, has been treated by transfer matrix theory [4].

© 2003 Optical Society of America