Arrayed Fiberoptics has unveiled its patented technology platform called Vertical Fiber Integration (VFI), which integrates a very precise fibre passive alignment mechanism into microfabricated devices during the fabrication stage, on a full-wafer scale. As a result, the company said, the fibre alignment issue is solved before wafer dicing.
Arrayed Fiberoptics intends to team with fibre optic component vendors to enable them to offer a new breed of very high-performance, high-reliability, very low-cost components based on VFI technology. Vendors can integrate VFI into existing components to improve their characteristics, or alternatively use it to create revolutionary new component designs.
VFI enables a wide variety of low-cost, single-mode fibre optic components, both active and passive, in array or single-channel form, such as fibre arrays, epoxy-free fibre arrays, transmitters, receivers, transceivers, VOAs, optical switches, array fibre connectors, collimators and beam-shapers, optical filters, and a variety of other devices.
The key to VFI is a precise vertical light transmission path through the wafer, perpendicular to the wafer plane. In the case of existing technologies, after the wafer is diced into individual components, each component must then be separately actively aligned to fibres for optimal performance. This alignment is difficult and expensive, and makes existing fibre optic components relatively large, expensive, and prone to failure.
In contrast, VFI components use a stack of wafers, each wafer contains microfabricated optical elements performing optical functions such as collimation, focusing, filtering, deflection, or fibre passive alignment of a light beam as it vertically traverses the wafer stack. One of the wafers in this stack contains patented precision fibre sockets for fibre passive alignment, simultaneously aligning all of the thousands of components on the wafer. The stack of wafers together form multiple vertically integrated optical circuits. Next the wafer stack is permanently bonded (providing natural hermetic sealing) using semiconductor wafer bonding techniques, and diced. Fibres are then passively inserted into the pre-aligned sockets, and attached with strain-relief packaging. The full wafer alignment and packaging approach is claimed to result in dramatic improvement in performance, size, cost, hermeticity, and reliability; in many cases these are orders-of-magnitude improvements.
Don Scifres, Chairman of SDL Ventures and former Co-Chairman/Chief Strategy Officer of JDS Uniphase, stated, "This really is a revolutionary approach to the well-known problem of alignment and packaging. For the first time, Arrayed Fiberoptics has introduced the third dimension to a fibre optic component packaging problem that had hit the limits of 2-dimensional architectures. Furthermore, VFI is a natural to create integrated arrays of devices. A very long list of components are prime candidates to take advantage of this breakthrough".
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