Fluidic assembly of optical components

A self-assembly technique is used to match microscopic components in a desired configuration with a high degree of precision. The basis of this self-assembly technique is capillary forces that are used to assemble the micro components. A liquid solder provides the capillary forces by wetting a 3-D cavity in each of the parts to be assembled. An advantage of the proposed design is that the high degree of precision of the mating feature relative to the optical guides ensures a high degree of concentricity of the optical path in the device. The application presented is the self-assembly of arrays of single-mode optical fibers onto an optical chip for use in optical switches or tunable filters. Optical measurements revealed an insertion loss of less than 0.85 dB, which demonstrates misalignment in the order of 1 mu m.