Abstract: At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we haveextensive experience with the design and development ofminiature photonic systems which require novelpackaging schemes. Over the years we have developedsilicon micro-optical benches to serve as a stableplatform for precision mounting of optical andelectronic components. We have developed glass balllenses that can be fabricated in-situ on the microbenchsubstrate. We have modified commercially availablemolded plastic fiber ribbon connectors (MT) and addedthin film multilayer semiconductor coatings to createpotentially low-cost wavelength combiners andwavelength selective filters. We have fabricated bothvertical-cavity and in-plane semiconductor lasers andamplifiers, and have packaged these and othercomponents into several miniature photonics systems.For example, we have combined the silicon optical benchwith standard electronic packaging techniques and ourcustom-made wavelength-selective filters to develop afour-wavelength wavelength-division-multiplexingtransmitter module mounted in a standard 120-pinceramic PGA package that couples light from severalvertical-cavity-surface-emitting-laser arrays into onemultimode fiber-ribbon array. The coupling loss can beas low as 2 dB, and the transmitters can be operated atover 1.25 GHz. While these systems were not designedfor biomedical or environmental applications, theconcepts and techniques are general and widelyapplicable. !8
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