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With the increasing growth of semiconductor and photonics technology, the optical materials have attracted considerable attention since they can meet the demanding performance requirements for the telecommunication, data communication and information storage systems.1'2 One of the most interesting and fast-developing classes of optical materials is optical polymers, which show promising over silica and semiconductors as a platform technology for photonics integration in that optical polymers are able to provide increased functionality, rapid fabrication, much efficient power and furthermore they have the potential to facilitate next-generation hybrid active/passive devices.3'4 To achieve high level of photonics integration, planar waveguide technology is considered to represent one of the more significant technologies of the next decade that paves the path with innovative polymers, hybrid materials and low- cost integrated optical components, as well as brings about substantial advantages in some issues such as labor cost, component density and optical loss.5'6'7 A new class of curable optical polymers containing benzocyclobutenone (ca. BCBO polymers) has been developed as waveguide materials for photonic integration.8 BCBO (1) is a latent reactive ketene and readily undergoes thermal and photochemical reactions in quantitative yield with a variety of functional molecules such as an alcohol (Scheme 1).
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