Fiber Array (FA) is an array composed of a bundle of fibers or a fiber strip installed on a V-Groove substrate at specified intervals.
Optical fiber arrays in optical communication mainly include substrate, platen, and fiber. Usually, multiple grooves are cut out at the base of the substrate, and the pressing plate is pressed and the optical fiber inserted into the groove is secured. Fiber arrays are very demanding in terms of materials and manufacturing processes.
The fiber array mainly relies on the precision carved V groove to realize the positioning. The V-groove requires a special cutting process to achieve accurate fiber positioning. The bare fiber part without fiber coating is placed in the V-groove. This process requires ultra-precision machining technology to accurately locate the fiber core in the V-groove to reduce connection loss, and then pressurized by the compressor component and fixed with adhesives, and the end face is optically ground to form a 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 the fiber array without stress, high reliability, and no fiber shift at high temperature. Glass and silicon are commonly used materials, but also ceramics, conductive substrates, and plastic substrates.
Optical fiber array
The slot-to-slot distance, the number of fiber channels, and the grinding Angle of the V-groove are customized according to the needs, but the center-to-center size accuracy between adjacent grooves is within ± 0.5μm, and the parallelism between adjacent grooves is within ± 0.1 degrees. Most of the fibers used in FA are colored ribbon fibers, which have good anti-bending properties and colorful colors can easily distinguish the channels.
WTC is usually used in planar optical waveguide, array waveguide grating, active/passive array optical fiber device, microelectromechanical system; Multi-channel optical module, etc. Among them, fiber array is one of the important components of planar optical waveguide Splitter (PLC Splitter), which can greatly reduce the loss of optical waveguide devices and optical coupling alignment. Wanchuang Communication provides a variety of Fiber Array options, such as the number of fiber array channels, fiber core spacing and grinding Angle can be customized. Wenchuon Communication Technology has been focusing on OEM/ODM production of passive optical communication devices for 15 years. With a strong R & D team and production capacity, Wenchuon Communication Technology can provide customers with one-stop customized production services of design, research and development, and manufacturing of passive optical communication basic devices. The product line mainly includes fiber connectors, fiber jumpers, PLC splitters, WDM wavelength division multiplexers, MEMS optical switches, etc.
