Lithographically fabricated fiber guides for optical subassemblies

A new optoelectronic packaging technology is presented which permits highly accurate fiber-to-chip alignment at low cost. Instead of the more common methods employed in fabricating optical subassemblies, which use leadframe, precision plastic-molding, or silicon-optical-bench technology, here fiber guides are fabricated in a photoresist by use of standard photolithographic procedures. By this means the fiber guides are directly created on an entire wafer of either VCSELs or receivers, resulting in structures with very tight dimensional tolerances fabricated at very low cost. After dicing, a fiber is interfaced with a chip under computer control using a very simple semiautomatic tool to insert the fiber into the fiber guide. This new technology may be used in the fabrication of a wide variety of single or multi-channel optoelectronic transceivers.