Bandwidth and Offset Launch Investigations on a 1.4 m Multimode Polymer Spiral Waveguide

TL;DR

This study investigates the bandwidth performance of a 1.4-meter spiral polymer multimode waveguide with various input conditions, demonstrating its potential for high-speed short-reach data communication applications.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive bandwidth analysis of a spiral polymer multimode waveguide with different input offsets, showing high data rate capabilities.

Findings

Bandwidth of at least 30 GHz for all input types

Bandwidth-length product of at least 42 GHz·m

No performance impact from input offsets

Abstract

Bandwidth measurements are conducted on a 1.4 m long spiral polymer multimode waveguide for a SMF and 50/125 um MMF launch and for different input offsets. The waveguide exhibits a bandwidth of at least 30 GHz for all input types, yielding a bandwidth-length product of at least 42 GHzxm, while no impact is observed on the waveguide performance due to the different spatial input offsets. The results indicate that data transmission at data rates even higher than 25 Gb/s can be achieved over such structures, thereby demonstrating the potential of multimode polymer waveguide technologies in short-reach board-level datacommunication links.