Fiber-to-Chip Fusion Splicing for Low-Loss Photonic Packaging

Silicon photonic devices are poised to enter high-volume markets such as data communications, telecommunications, biological sensing, and optical phased arrays. Permanently attaching a fiber to the photonic chip with high optical efficiency, however, remains a challenge.

We present a robust, low-loss packaging technique of permanent optical edge coupling between a fiber and a chip using fusion splicing that is low-cost and scalable for high-volume manufacturing.

We fuse a SMF-28 cleaved fiber to the chip via a CO2 laser and reinforce it with optical adhesive.

We demonstrate minimum loss of 1.0 dB per facet with 0.6 dB penalty over a 160 nm bandwidth from 1480 to 1640 nm.

J. Nauriyal, M. Song, R. Yu, and J. Cardenas, “Fiber-to-chip fusion splicing for low-loss photonic packaging,” Optica 6(5), 549 - 552 (2019). Pre-print: arXiv:1810.09531  https://opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-6-5-549&id=409327