What is Fiber Array (FA)?

Fiber Array (FA for short) is an array formed by installing a bundle of optical fibers or a fiber ribbon on the substrate at specified intervals by using a V-Groove substrate.

An optical fiber array in optical communication mainly includes a substrate, a pressing plate, and an optical fiber. Usually, a plurality of grooves are cut on the base of the substrate, and the optical fiber is fixed into the groove by the pressure plate. Optical fiber arrays have high requirements on materials and manufacturing processes.

Fiber Array is usually located by the precision carved V-shaped grooves. The V-groove requires special cutting process to achieve precise fiber positioning. In order to reduce the connection fiber loss, it’s very important to accurately position the fiber core in the V-groove. After positioning, pressurize with a compactor and fix it with an adhesive to polish the end face of the optical fiber. That is the final fiber array. The substrate material will affect the optical performance of the optical fiber array, and it is necessary to use a material with a small expansion coefficient to ensure that the optical fiber array has no stress, high reliability, and no fiber displacement at high temperatures. Glass and silicon are commonly used materials, in addition to ceramics, conductive substrates and plastic substrates.

The distance between the grooves of the V-shaped groove, the number of fiber channels, and the grinding angle are all customized according to the needs. The parallelism of the groove length direction between the grooves is usually within ± 0.1 degrees. Most of the fibers used in FA are colored ribbon fibers, which have good bending resistance, and the colorful colors can easily distinguish the channels.

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

 PD provides a variety of choices of fiber arrays, such as the number of fiber array channels, core spacing and grinding angle can be customized. It has a strong R&D team and production capacity. It can provide customers with one-stop customized production of optical communication passive basic device design, R&D and manufacturing. Product lines mainly include optical fiber connectors, optical fiber jumpers, PLC splitters, wavelength division multiplexers(WDM), MEMS optical switches, etc.