Optical fiber arrays in optical communications mainly include substrates, pressure plates, and optical fibers. Usually, a plurality of grooves are cut in the base of the substrate, and the pressure plate is pressed and fixed to the optical fiber inserted into the grooves. Optical fiber arrays have very high requirements on materials and manufacturing processes.

The optical fiber array mainly relies on the precisely carved V-groove to achieve positioning. The V-groove requires a special cutting process to achieve precise fiber positioning. The bare fiber part that has been removed from the fiber coating is placed in the V-groove. This process requires ultra-precision processing technology to precisely position the fiber core in the V-groove In order to reduce the connection loss, it is pressed by the presser part and fixed with adhesive, and the end face is optically polished to form an optical fiber array. The substrate material will affect the optical properties of the fiber array, and it is necessary to use a material with a small expansion coefficient to ensure that the fiber array has no stress, high reliability, and no fiber displacement at high temperatures. Glass and silicon are commonly used materials, but there are also ceramics, conductive substrates, and plastic substrates.

Fiber Array

The distance between the grooves of the V-groove, the number of optical fiber channels, and the grinding angle are all customized according to the requirements, but the accuracy of the center-to-center dimension between adjacent grooves is ± 0.5 μm, adjacent The parallelism of the groove length direction between the grooves is within ± 0.1 degrees. Most of the optical fibers used by FA are colored ribbon optical fibers, which have good bending resistance, and the colorful colors can easily distinguish the channels.

Fiber Array

Optical fiber arrays are usually used in planar optical waveguides, arrayed waveguide gratings, active/passive array optical fiber devices, micro-electromechanical systems; multi-channel optical modules, etc. Among them, the optical fiber array is one of the important components of the planar optical waveguide splitter (PLC Splitter), which can greatly reduce the loss of optical waveguide devices and optical coupling alignment.