Study of selectively buried ion-exchange glass waveguides using backside masking

In this Letter, we study the characteristics of a selectively buried glass waveguide that is fabricated by the backside masking method. The results show that the surface region appears when the width of the backside mask is larger than 7 mm. Here, the glass substrate is 1.5 mm thick. It is also found that the buried depth evolution of the transition region remains almost unchanged and is independent of the width of the backside mask. The loss of the transition region is only 0.28 dB at the wavelength of 1.55 mu m if the surface condition is good enough.