Flexography Printing of Polymer Optical Waveguides

In this article flexography printing of polymer optical waveguides is discussed. For this purpose a Heidelberger Speedmaster printing machine is used. At first, a general introduction to the field of polymer optical waveguides is given followed by the current state of the art of dispensing methods. In the third part of this article, the flexography printing method is presented with its challenges for an application to produce polymer optical waveguides. The results of first printing tests with modified flexography printing parameters are shown exemplarily.