Optical Fiber Array Product Families for Silicon Photonics Integrated Chips
Sep 09, 2022
POINTek, Inc., a global leader and provider of high performance athermal AWGs, announced launching of new Application-Specific Optical Fiber Array Products, Silicon Photonics (SiPh) Fiber Arrays, which is capable of supporting the back-end packaging for Silicon Photonics Integrated Circuits (PIC).
This new Silicon Photonics Fiber Arrays have the excellent characteristics of a fine fiber-end mirror-surface quality and an accurate fiber protrusion length uniformity to match with the prefabricated V-grooves on a Silicon PIC chip. The required fiber protrusion length is typically 5mm with ≤±2mm length uniformity in an array. Both Single Mode (SM) Fiber Arrays and Polarization Maintaining (PM) Fiber Arrays are available with or without 12-channel MT ferrule termination.
"This new SiPh Fiber Array is designed to passively align the multiple optical fibers into the wafer-fabricated V-grooves on the Silicon PIC chip without the expensive and complicated active alignment equipment, and furthermore, the passive alignment of the Array can be accomplished without monitoring the optical power," according to Dr. Donald Yu, CMO of POINTek, operating from Los Angeles, California. Yu explains that the optical fiber array is a key component to efficiently assemble the PIC devices for coupling the multiple fibers into the multiple I/O waveguides on a PIC chip. In the conventional optical active alignment assembly process, the expensive automatic precision alignment equipment should be utilized while monitoring the optical power in the packaging process, and it often takes the long processing time. "However, for this new SiPh Fiber Array, the fibers can be precisely placed in the Silicon PIC's V-grooves with the minimal operation costs. Therefore, the passive alignment of Silicon PIC could result in the very affordable SiPh device price in the market," Yu adds (see Figure 1).
