Patterning of inorganic polymer glass waveguiding films by dry etching

Polymer waveguides have long been of interest for low cost integrated optical devices. Inorganic Polymer glasses are a class of materials based around polysiloxanes which have many attractive features for low cost integrated optics and meet the stringent reliability requirements for deployment in carrier networks. The inorganic polymer glasses available for this work are normally patterned as negative photoresists but this leads to a resolution limit on the achievable feature size due to free radical diffusion. Therefore we demonstrate here high quality dry etching of these materials using standard photoresist masking and the fabrication of small high index contrast waveguides with losses marginally higher than the intrinsic materials losses.