Active alignment of densely spaced optical fibers for high-accuracy fiber arrays manufacturing

A fiber array manufacturing method based on a novel micro-actuator is presented. The micro-actuator consists of a comb of cantilevers capable of aligning densely spaced fibers with 250μm pitch, independently and simultaneously. The horizontal and vertical position of the tip of every fiber can be controlled with a tuning range of several micrometers and with nanometer-scale resolution. The fibers are actively aligned to a high-accuracy reference device and permanently blocked within a glass ferrule by UV-adhesive curing. Active alignment is performed to achieve a core-positioning accuracy smaller than ±100nm, for all the fibers.