What is a Fiber Array (FA)?

A Fiber Array (FA) uses a V-Groove substrate to install a bundle of optical fibers or an optical fiber strip on the substrate at a specified interval.

 

The optical fiber array in optical communication mainly includes a substrate, a platen, and an optical fiber. Multiple grooves are usually cut at the base of the substrate, and the platens are pressed and the optical fibers inserted into the grooves are fixed. Fiber optic arrays are very demanding in terms of materials and manufacturing processes.

 

The optical fiber array mainly relies on the precision carved V-shaped slot to achieve positioning. V-groove requires the use of a special cutting process to achieve accurate optical fiber positioning, the bare fiber part of the removed fiber coating is placed in the V-groove, this process requires ultra-precision machining technology to precisely position the fiber core in the V-groove to reduce the connection loss, and then pressurized by the compressor component and fixed with adhesive, the end face is optically ground to form the optical fiber array. The substrate material will affect the optical properties of the fiber array, so it is necessary to use a material with a small expansion coefficient to ensure that the fiber array is stress-free, high reliability, and no fiber displacement at high temperatures. Glass and silicon are commonly used materials, but ceramic, conductive substrates and plastic substrates are also available.

 

What is a Fiber Array (FA)?

 

The distance between the grooves, the number of fibre channels, and the grinding Angle of the V-shaped grooves are customized according to the requirements, but the center-to-center dimensions between the grooves adjacent to each other are accurate to ± 0.5 μm, and the parallelism in the direction of the grooves length between the adjacent grooves is within ± 0.1 degrees. The fiber used by FA is mostly colored ribbon fiber, which has good bending resistance, and the colorful color can easily distinguish the channel.

 

What is a Fiber Array (FA)?

 

Optical fiber arrays are commonly used in planar optical waveguides, array waveguide grating, active/passive array optical fiber devices, MEMS. Multi-channel optical module, 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.