Univ. Prof. Dr. Ing.

Bergs, Thomas

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  • Publication
    Efficient Fiber-Photonic Integrated Circuit Connection via Wafer-Scale Glass Molding
    ( 2022-12-12)
    Michels, Robert
    ;
    Grunwald, Tim
    ;
    Bergs, Thomas
    Increasing demand for higher data rates in data centers is driving efforts to produce single-mode optics, which substantially improves the commonly used infrastructures. However, the fiber cou-pling to photonic integrated circuits (PICs) is currently a bottle neck. The optics needed to link optical fibers to PICs are sub-millimeter in size and call for extreme precision both at the manu-facturing as well as the assembling stage. Using glass instead of plastic optics increases the optical performance and therefore, the transmissible data rates but results in higher production costs. Fraunhofer IPT and partners developed an innovative, efficient glass fiber coupling technology based on the replicative process of glass molding. In a glass molding process, a glass preform is heated until the viscous state and afterwards pressed into the desired shape using two high-precise molds. This process permits the direct and efficient manufacture of high shape accuracy and sur-face quality optics without any mechanical post-processing steps. To fabricate the fiber couplers, two different glass molding technologies were explored and compared: The highly precise, but slow isothermal process of precision glass molding (PGM) and the more efficient, but less precise non-isothermal glass molding (NGM). A scale-up strategy has been developed which is based on a wafer-scale approach. This allowed producing a large number of identical elements in one mold-ing operation out of a single glass wafer, which increased the efficiency both of the manufacturing process and of the subsequent assembly operations. The development covers all aspects of the realization of single-mode fiber coupling - from the optical and electrical design of the connectors and PICs through process technology, machine tool manufacture and assembly technology to ap-plication within the system and the analysis of the coupling efficiency from fiber to PIC.