Transmission of 43-Gb/s optical signals through a single-mode polymer waveguide for LAN-WDM

We demonstrate transmission of 43-Gb/s NRZ optical signals through a 2.3-cm-long single-mode polymer waveguide at the eight wavelengths of the Local Area Network Wavelength Division Multiplexing (LAN-WDM). The polymer optical waveguides have a propagation loss of 0.4 dB/cm and a polarization dependent loss (PDL) of less than 0.5 dB over the entire O-Band (100 nm wide from 1260 to 1360 nm). The coupling loss between the polymer waveguide and a single mode fiber is 0.5 dB/facet. Error-free optical transmission at the data rate of 43-Gb/s was achieved without noticeable penalty in all the LAN-WDM channels ranging from 1273.55 to 1309.14 nm. To investigate the possibility of high-capacity WDM transmission that utilize eight optical signals with different wavelength, we also studied the performance of the polymer waveguide at high input powers. First, we observed that there is a linear relationship between the input power and the output power with the input light power of up to 90 mW. This observation shows that the polymer waveguide has a high damage threshold against high input power and there is no excess loss caused by thermal effect. Second, we assessed the nonlinear optical effect of the polymer waveguide by launching an ultrashort optical pulse with a peak power of 500 mW and observed no signal distortion due to cross phase-modulation (XPM) or four-wave mixing (FWM). These results suggest the polymer waveguide is potentially available for high-capacity data transmission at 344 Gb/s or more by 8-channel LAN-WDM.