A fiber-ribbon positioning device

A positioning device for accurately positioning an array of multimode fibers with a cladding diameter of 125-140 mu m is described in this paper. The device has grooved sidewalls adapted to hold 16 fibers and includes a vacuum chamber communicating with openings in the beddings. It may be used to align a complete array of fibers in a single operation with respect to an array of elements such as lasers. A typical coupling-loss difference of 0.5 dB has been achieved for the alignment of an eight-element 140 mu m multimode fiber array with a laser array. This positioning device is part of the tooling, therefore is reusable. Experiments show that it is suitable and flexible for the alignment of multimode fibers in lasers, and is a cost-effective device.