Fully Flexible Optoelectronic Foil

In this paper, we present a process to embed commercially available optical material layers into a flexible foil. Patterning of the embedded layers results in highly transparent low-loss flexible waveguides. Bending of the foil down to a bending radius of 5 mm causes no additional optical propagation losses. Vertical cavity surface emitting laser's and photodiodes are thinned down to 20 m and are embedded inside the cladding layer of the waveguides. They are optically coupled with the use of embedded micromirror plugs. The result is a thin foil of 150 m thickness with embedded active optical low-loss links. The presented links show an average total optical loss of 6.4 dB and a clear open-eye diagram at 1.2 Gb/s. The foil characteristics do not change after humidity and temperature cycling.