Optical cross connectors for distributed fiber switches

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) are promising for achieving low-cost optical interconnections. To realize them, alignment-tolerant and low-cost optical assembling techniques become important in addition to performance improvements on VCSELs. To reduce the alignment difficulties during fiber assembly, we are attempting to use large-core plastic cladding fibers (PCFs) and imaging fibers (IMF) with VCSELs. Here, we propose a distributed fiber switch (DFS) that consists of VCSELs and an optical cross connector (OCC) using PCFs. We demonstrate OCCs fabricated by using a plastic molding technique and report on their optical transmission characteristics