Abstract

Optical fiber communications systems need a number of optical functional devices. We have pursued direct integration of those devices into optical fibers,¹ as shown in Fig. 1. A micro- I device chip such as an isolator is inserted into thermally expanded core (TEC) fibers.² Features of this integration technique include line-free, alignment-free configuration and the ease of integration into a fiber array. In this paper we propose a new configuration of fiber-integrated isolators utilizing TEC fibers and birefringent wedges in order to obtain higher performance than previously reported.³ The performance is theoretically estimated and experimentally demonstrated.

© 1996 Optical Society of America