Abstract

Polymeric optical waveguides have attracted a lot of attention with a view to their future application as optical components in the optical interconnect and access network fields, because they can be produced inexpensively Polymeric optical waveguides can be fabricated by oxygen reactive ion etching(O₂ RIR) However, the etched surface is not so smooth Ion beam etch techniques like ion beam etching(IBE) and reactive ion beam etching(RIBE) have two advantages compared with the conventional RIE techniques. First, the samples are out of the plasma region. Consequently, the kinetic energy and angle of incidence of the ions can be chosen independently from the parameters of the plasma production. Therefore it is also possible to optimize the ion beam profile to obtain homogeneous etching independent of the plasma parameters. Second there is a wide range of parameters to influence physical and chemical etch characteristics. Yanagisawa et al have reported the reactive ion beam etching using N₂ gas and demonstrated the vertical side wall shapes of polyimide[1]. This vertical side wall shapes seen to be realized by the sidewall blocking

© 2000 IEEE