High-speed performance evaluation of ultra-flexible polymer waveguides supporting meter-scale optical interconnects

We demonstrate bandwidth measurement and high-speed data transmission of meter-scale connectorized ultra-flexible multimode waveguide links with a maximum length of 180 cm. The pulses propagating through the waveguides broadened linearly with the increase of the length from 20 cm to 240 cm and the estimated mode delay from the pulse broadening was 0.093 ps/cm. The corresponding waveguide bandwidth decreased inversely with the increase of waveguide length, leading to a bandwidth-length product of 42 GHz·m. Degradation in bandwidth due to the introduction of bending or twisting was small when the samples were bent with a bending radius as small as 1 mm for 3 turns or twisted for 4 full turns, respectively. Error-free transmission of 30 Gb/s non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signal was achieved with a record link length up to 140 cm to the best of our knowledge. Our results show that the demonstrated flexible waveguides have both excellent optical and mechanical properties and are ideal for high-speed optical interconnects application especially those have a strict requirement on flexibility.