Assembly of optical fibers for the connection of polymer-based waveguide

Abstract

This paper describes the realisation of polymer-based optical structures and the assembly and packaging strategy to connect optical fibre ribbons to the waveguides. For that a low cost fabrication process using the SU-8™ thick photo-resist is presented. This process consists in the deposition of two photo-structurized resist layers filled up with epoxy glue realising the core waveguide. For the assembly, a new modular vacuum gripper was realised and installed on an automatic pick & place assembly robot to mount precisely and efficiently the optical fibres in the optical structures. First results have shown acceptable optical propagation loss for the complete test structure.