Optical device module packages for subscriber incorporating passive alignment techniques

Compact optical module packages for use as 156 Mbps optical interfaces have been developed by incorporating passive alignment techniques. In this approach, a laser chip and a fiber are aligned on a V-grooved silicon substrate by flip-chip bonding. The silicon substrates have been fabricated by conventional silicon processing and micro-machining technologies. A new feature of our fabrication technique is to implement a self-alignment principle for the formation of V-grooves and solder bumps, which eliminates a registration error from the individual process. The laser diode and photo diode submodules, assembled on silicon substrates, exhibited 4-6% and about 80% coupling efficiencies, respectively. The fabricated proto-type transmitter and receiver module packages have a very compact size of 5 cc each and showed adequate performance satisfying the requirement for optical subscriber transmitter and receiver modules.