Fabrication of Lensed Fibers with Arc Fusion Splicer for Telecommunication Applications

The field of telecommunications is constantly evolving and looking for new inventions to improve transmission speeds, transmission quality, reduce costs, etc. One of the most promising innovations of recent times is photonic integrated circuits. These have arisen as a consequence of miniaturization trends and increased demand for higher data transmission speeds and pave the way to a very cost-effective future-minded technology. A significant problem for these chips is the inherently high insertion loss when coupling light into the chip. It is possible, for instance, to use various types of on-chip optical coupler configurations, e.g., focusing grating couplers, to mitigate it to some extent. Still, the high loss makes testing devices that use such technologies difficult and time-consuming. Alternatively, one can use so-called lensed fibers, which are relatively easier to work with and can effectively reduce the insertion loss of incoming light. In this paper, we demonstrate the ‘in-house’ production of spherical lensed fibers (SLF) by using a commercially available arc fusion splicer, which is a common piece of equipment used in the field of fiber optical communications and photonics. Our main goal is to establish how easily this fabrication method allows for manipulating important lensed fiber parameters, such as working distance and spot size. This evaluation includes the ease of production, the consistency of the fabricated samples, and the number of iterations required to hone in on the lens parameters required for the specific application. The fabricated samples are compared to commercial-grade lensed fiber products, which are used as a baseline comparison.