Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-29-2013

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Abstract

The self-imaging property of multimode waveguides creates a challenging problem when finding the optimal placement position of an out-of-plane coupler for embedded waveguides. This problem is compounded when the waveguides are coupled using a small input such as a vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) or a single mode fiber where only some of the modes are generated. When the waveguide system is under filled, the coupling efficiency for the optical vertical interconnect assembly (VIA) can vary by as much as 6.2 dB depending on the length of the proceeding waveguide due to different output fields from the self-imaging property. This requires sweeping each individual VIA over the entire range of possible coupler positions to find the total maximum coupling efficiency. This process increases in complexity when a VIA supports several parallel channels all having a different optical path length. If a VIA can be placed in a calculated position from the end of a terminated embedded waveguide dependent upon the modal structure then blind pick and place methods may be used. The optimal coupler placement was determined based on smallest average VIA attenuation, smallest attenuation variance, and worse-case alignment scenario.

Publisher's Statement

Copyright © 2013 Nicholas Riegel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.4236/opj.2013.36053

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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