Active alignment of densely spaced optical fibers for high-accuracy fiber arrays manufacturing (Invited Paper)

A fiber array manufacturing method based on a novel micro-actuator is presented. The micro-actuator consists of a comb of cantilevers capable of aligning densely spaced fibers with 250 µm pitch, independently and simultaneously. The horizontal and vertical position of the tip of every fiber can be controlled with a tuning range of several micrometers and with nanometer-scale resolution. The fibers are actively aligned to a high-accuracy reference device and permanently blocked within a glass ferrule by UV-adhesive curing. Active alignment is performed to achieve a core-positioning accuracy smaller than ± 100 nm, for all the fibers.