Mechanical clip-on and flip-chip assembly on silicon submount for self aligned fiber to waveguide coupling

Flip chip bonding by use of solder bumps has been widely developed to hybridize active devices such as lasers, detectors, and amplifiers, onto silicon microbenches. We report here a new method allowing hybridization of any kind of substrate onto a silicon submount with a passive and high precision self alignment process, the substrate being held in three dimensions, allowing coupling of waveguides to multiple fibers. Moreover the system allows a detachable configuration and avoids any additional micromachining of the waveguide substrate. Alignment of the waveguide axis with the V-grooves axis was obtained with an accuracy better than 2 /spl mu/m. Preliminary results indicate that the excess loss during the self-alignment and coupling of a fiber by insertion in a V-groove compared to an active alignment was typically of -3 dB.