Precision for photonics

The adoption of photonic chips is currently held back by the considerable cost involved in their production. In particular, optical fibre alignment and fixation have been a bottleneck in terms of product performance, cost and production volume. A new optical fibre array has been developed to couple multiple fibres to a photonic device with sub-micrometer accuracy. To assemble this fibre array in an automated manner, a fibre-array assembly machine has been designed and realised, as described in this Mikroniek article. This machine is able to assemble a 16-fibre array within four minutes with a 100 nm alignment accuracy, which is both significantly faster and more accurate than currently employed methods can achieve.