Athermal Polymer Arrayed Waveguide Grating Router for Optical Backplane

To address the demand for non-blocking cross-interconnections between multiple on-board CPUs over centimeter-to-meter scales, we present the design and fabrication of polymer arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) on FR4 substrates. The measured average insertion loss of all channels is 6.28 dB, while the average crosstalk is -15.77 dB, and the 3-dB bandwidth is approximately 0.8 nm. We also test the temperature stability of the fabricated AWGR, and the wavelength drift rate is -2.23 pm/°C, which reveals the temperature insensitivity of the fabricated AWGR.