Synthesis and characterization of fluorinated poly (maleimide-co- methacrylate)s for optical waveguiding materials

The objective of this study is to obtain thermally stable and low optical loss polymers for optical waveguiding materials. The crosslinkable poly(maleimide-co-methacrylate)s were synthesized using a pentafluorophenylmaleimide (an optical loss reducer), two methacrylate derivatives (refractive index controllers), and a glycidylmethacrylate (a crosslinker). These copolymers exhibited good thermal stability and could be thermally crosslinked by heat treatment. The refractive indexes of the copolymers could be precisely controlled by the variation of comonomer feed ratio, which was in the range of 1.45-1.49. These copolymers had very low birefringence of 6 × 10^-4-<1 × 10^-4. These copolymers were crosslinked by contact printing and then developed by wet etching to obtain high quality waveguide pattern.