A surface-emitting laser array with backside guiding holes for passive alignment to parallel optical fibers

A simple method of coupling parallel fibers to a surface-emitting laser (SEL) array is proposed and demonstrated. The SEL chip has guiding holes on the backside which are aligned precisely to the SEL mesas on the front side. Optical coupling can be achieved by simply inserting fibers to the guiding holes. A 4/spl times/3 array of common-anode SELs with guiding holes is fabricated and assembled in a face-down manner. Three fiber tapes each of which includes four fibers are coupled to the array. The average of measured coupling efficiencies to multimode fibers is 35.0% and further improvement can be expected.