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 p aper. The device has grooved sidewalls adapted to hold 16 fibers and i ncludes a vacuum chamber communicating with openings in the beddings. It may be used to align a complete array of fibers in a single operati on with respect to an array of elements such as lasers. A typical coup ling-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. Th is positioning device is part of the tooling, therefore is reusable. E xperiments show that it is suitable and flexible for the alignment of multimode fibers in lasers, and is a cost-effective device.