Kris Naessens

Fabrication of microgrooves with excimer laser ablation techniques for plastic optical fiber array alignment purposes

Laser ablation is extremely well suited for rapid prototyping and proves to be a versatile technique delivering high accuracy dimensioning and repeatability of features in a wide diversity of materials. In this paper, we present laser ablation as a fabrication method for micro machining in of arrays consisting of precisely dimensioned U-grooves in dedicated polycarbonate and polymethylmetacrylate plates. The dependency of the performance on various parameters is discussed. The fabricated plates are used to hold optical fibers by means of a UV-curable adhesive. Stacking and gluing of the plates allows the assembly of a 2D connector of plastic optical fibers for short distance optical interconnects.

Substrate-removed 850-nm RCLEDs and small core (63/125 um) plastic optical fibers for optical data communication

Current developments in computer technology give rise to increasing data communication over relatively short distances at backplane- and inter MCM interconnect level. It is foreseen that electrical interconnect will not be able to accommodate the necessary data traffic in advanced data processing systems in the future and hence a bottleneck will be created. A potential remedy for this interconnect problem is the use of parallel optical datalinks. In this paper we propose small diameter step index plastic optical fiber ribbons in combination with high efficient resonant cavity LEDs as a cheap and feasible option for these optical links. A design for such an optical link is presented with special attention for the optical pathway. Experimental results on the optical properties of the used POF are shown. We describe the development of RCLEDs at 850 nm specially designed for efficient coupling into POF. We measured a RCLED to POF coupling efficiency up to 40%. Additionally we report on the technologies used for the fabrication and assembly of the optical pathways and finally some experiments were carried out on the first realized assemblies.

Fabrication of a 2D connector for coupling a 4/spl times/8 array of small diameter plastic optical fiber (117/125 /spl mu/m) to RCLED or VCSEL arrays

Currently, the data communication and interconnect world is marked by an ever increasing demand of data density, compactness and efficiency. In the past, serial links were gradually replaced by 1D parallel data communication through fiber arrays. A possible further route towards even higher density and aggregate capacity is to move towards 2D parallel fiber arrays. In this paper, we report on the fabrication of a prototype 2D-connector that in a later stage can be replicated using standard molding techniques. In our application, in view of cost and flexibility reasons, polymer optical fiber (117 /spl mu/m core/125 /spl mu/m cladding diameter, NA=0.5) is used as medium for short distance 2D links for inter-chip interconnections.