Dry-film technology as a standard process for passive optical alignment of Silicon Photonics Devices

Packaging of optoelectronic devices has always been a bottleneck for mass production. Today, it is still the case for silicon photonics devices. Intrinsically, the technology of silicon nanowires integrated onto SOI electronic integrated circuits allows the same kind of cost reduction as the one encountered in the microelectronic industry. However, smart solutions have to be proposed in order not to lose this benefit because of the use of non suitable packaging architectures. In this paper, we present a low-cost, mass production compatible and easy-to-transfer technique that allows optical fibers to be passively aligned in front of silicon photonics devices' optical I/Os. This technique is based on the use of dry-film structures that enable optical fibers to be positioned with accuracy below 5 mum. Combined with optical input like photodiodes or with I/Os made of vertical grating coupler, this approach is a promising one for achieving future low cost integrated optical devices. Moreover, the concept could be extended to multichannel devices used for parallel optics links.