No.6（2003）7.Fabrication of multi-core ferrule for optical fiber communication

Takeshi UENO and Elito KAZAWA

A multi-core ferrule to be used for optical communications was fabricated and tested. We developed a new anisotropic etching method that makes it possible to form rhomboidal cross-sections by improving a conventional anisotropic etching methods to form silicon V groove microstructures. The advantage of our process is that the shapes of the grooves are automatically fixed to rhomboid microstructures, which result from the large difference of the etching rate occurring between an <100> surface and an <111> surface of a single-crystal silicon. Applying this feature, a low-cost, high accuracy optical connector was achieved without using a metallic mold. We also assumed that it could achieve preferable optical characteristics for optical communications. In this paper, we report on the details of the design, fabrication and the characteristics of our multi-core ferrule based on this new anisotropic etching.

Keywords
Ferrule, Silicon, Anisotropic etching

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