Near hexagonal close-packed optical fiber bundle for parallel optical interconnection

摘要

In conventionally 2-dimensional (2-D) parallel optical interconnection (POI), optical fibers must be accurately aligned to 2-D light sources and detectors using precisely fabricated hole-plate or stacked V-grooves. For polymer optical fibers with large diameter, the whole dimension of the bundle may be too huge to connect ICs if they are positioned using V-grooves or hole-plate. We propose a near hexagonal close packed optical fiber bundle (NHCP-OFB) to closely pack the fibers into a 2-D near hexagonal lattice with high positioning accuracy. Due to the fluctuation of the diameter of the commercial optical fibers, they cannot be packed into perfect hexagonal close packed (HCP) bundle. The proposed NHCP-OFB slightly stretches the perfect (HCP) bundle in one dimension and still have all fibers packed tightly with high packing fraction. The position of fibers in NHCP-OFB is very important when aligned to 2-D light sources and detectors. This paper analytically analysis the positioning offset of fibers in NHCP-OFB. The possibility distribution of positioning offset is related to variance of fiber diameter and stretched length of NHCP-OFB. Experiment samples of NHCP-OFB have been made using polymer optical fiber showing that fibers can be precisely positioned.