Abstract
Diffractive microlens arrays with up to 16 phase levels and 0.75 or 1.5 mm pitch have been fabricated to interconnect single mode fiber arrays (including extended mode fibers) in free-space switches. The fiber-to-fiber insertion loss can be in the 2 to 3 dB range at distances up to one meter, with only small (0.2 dB) inter-channel dispersion for one-dimension links. For two-dimension interconnections, the use of extended mode fibers could relax the packaging constraints and reduce the wavelength sensitivity, providing a bandwidth of several tens of nanometers, suited to optical cross-connects.
© 1999 Optical Society of America
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