Packaging of large-scale planar lightwave circuits

This paper describes the packaging of large-scale silica-based planar lightwave circuits (PLCs), fabricated on Si substrates. They include arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) multiplexers and star couplers with more than 32 channels, and optical matrix switches with a scale of 8/spl times/8 or greater. These devices all have a large channel-number or a large number of switch elements. There are various technological objectives and techniques related to large-scale PLCs which concern their optical, electrical, thermal, and mechanical characteristics. Several techniques are presented in detail based on experimental results.