We developed a novel low-cost polish-less elastically deformable optical multifiber backplane connector. The ferrule deformation and fibers buckling were enabled to cancel the variation in the lengths of unpolished cut fibers. We confirmed the physical contact connection between unpolished cut fibers in the ferrule and a polymer waveguide in a connector for polymer-waveguides connected with mechanical transfer connector (PMT) ferrule. The connection loss is almost the same as that between a conventional polished mechanical transfer (MT) ferrule and the PMT ferrule. We prepared a connector housing to mount the ferrules on a backplane/midplane. The insertion loss and return loss results in the housing show no degradations during 200 mating/demating tests, and there were no fiber breakages or damage to the waveguide core.

Date Published: 27 February 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8630, Optoelectronic Interconnects XIII, 863004 (27 February 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2003586

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8630:
Optoelectronic Interconnects XIII
Alexei L. Glebov; Ray T. Chen, Editor(s)