Attenuation in waveguides on FR-4 boards due to periodic substrate undulations

Author(s)
Chang, Yin-Jung
Chang, Gee-Kung
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Abstract
The guided-mode attenuation associated with optical-interconnect-polymer waveguides fabricated on FR-4 printed-circuit boards is quantified. The rigorous transmission-line network approach is used and the FR-4 substrate is treated as a long-period substrate grating. A quantitative metric for an appropriate matrix truncation is presented. The peaks of attenuation are shown to occur near the Bragg conditions that characterize the leaky-wave stop bands. For a typical 400 µm period FR-4 substrate with an 8 µm corrugation depth, a buffer layer thickness of about 40 µm is found to be needed to make the attenuation negligibly small.
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2007-04
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