Multichannel optical coupling with an aspherical lens and its application to an all-optical monolithic wavelength converter module

We propose a novel multi-channel optical coupling technique called MOCA for the packaging of opto-electronic functional devices, the optical I/O ports of which are array optical waveguides. MOCA (multichannel optical coupling with an aspherical lens) uses only an aspherical lens to couple an optical waveguide array to an optical fibre array. In spite of its simple configuration, MOCA provides efficient optical coupling for each optical I/O port and high performance for module reliability. To confirm the performance of MOCA, we applied it to the packaging of an all-optical wavelength converter chip or SIPAS (Sagnac interferometer integrated with parallel amplifiers structure), which will be a key device in near future WDM networks. The fabricated module shows that the coupling loss of each I/O port is less than 3.5 dB and that it acts as an all optical wavelength converter for 10 Gb/s-RZ optical signals.