Abstract

At present, the high cost of optoelectronic (OE) devices is caused in part by the laborintensive processes involved with packaging. Automating the packaging processes should result in a significant cost reduction. One of the most labor-intensive steps is aligning and attaching the fiber to the OE device, the so-called pigtailing process. The goad of this 2-year ARPA-funded project is to design and build 3 low-cost machines to perform sub-micron alignments and attachments of single-mode fibers to different OE devices. These Automated Fiber Pigtailing Machines (AFPMs) are intended to be compatible with a manufacturing environment and have a modular design for standardization of parts and machine vision for maximum flexibility. This work is a collaboration among Uniphase Telecommunications Products (formerly United Technologies Photonics, UTP), Ortel, Newport/Klinger, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Manufacturing Institute (MIT), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). UTP and Ortel are the industrial partners for whom two of the AFPMs are being built. MIT and LLNL make up the design and assembly team of the project, while Newport/Klinger is a potential manufacturer of the AFPM and provides guidance to ensure that the design of the AFPM is marketable and compatible with a manufacturing environment. The AFPM for UTP will pigtail LiNbO₃ waveguide devices and the AFPM for Ortel will pigtail photodiodes. Both of these machines will contain proprietary information, so the third AFPM, to reside at LLNL, will pigtail a non-proprietary waveguide device for demonstrations to US industry.

© 1996 Optical Society of America