eBook
V-grooves: Solving the Fiber Coupling Problem
As we move to terabit ethernet, fiber arrays will become increasingly important to hyperscale data center interconnects. Silicon V-grooves offer a pathway to significantly improve the cost effectiveness of the fiber attach process in silicon PIC packaging.
What you will learn in this ebook?
Learn common approaches to addressing the fiber packaging problem in silicon photonics
Discover how Atomica’s V-groove technology can facilitate low cost, high volume manufacturing of low loss, stable connections between silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) chips and optical fiber and fiber arrays.
The Fiber Packaging Problem:
Finding cost-effective solutions to address the problem of fiber-to-chip optical interconnection in silicon photonics is critical, particularly as fiber port counts per chip increase. Specifically, the problem to solve is the optical mode size mismatch between the silicon photonics chip wave guides and optical fibers.Traditional approaches to the fiber packaging problem require time consuming, serial active alignment which is not compatible with high volume, low cost manufacturing.
The solution:
The use of silicon V-grooves offers a pathway to significantly improve the cost effectiveness of the fiber attach process in silicon PIC packaging. V-grooves monolithically integrated with PICs permit low loss edge coupling with passive alignment to single fibers or fiber arrays. Hybrid integration strategies involving V-grooved sub-mounts facilitate alignment and packaging using machine vision in vertical coupling designs based on grating couplers, as well as simultaneous active alignment of fiber arrays in edge-coupling package geometries.
Learn more:
Atomica’s advanced wafer processing enables the integration of densely packed V-grooves to support high count fiber arrays in silicon photonics, enabling low cost reliable fiber attachment in a high-volume manufacturing environment.
