Motorized Positioning Solutions for Fiber Alignment

Automated Fiber Alignment

Newport provides a wide range of motorized stages and controllers to perform alignment and metrology of optical fibers and fiber optic components such as planar waveguides, AWGs and fiber collimators as well as completely automated alignment systems. For many applications including automated single-mode fiber alignments, lasers to fibers or wave-guides to fibers alignment, Newport motion systems can be customized to adapt to increasingly complex assembly and metrology demands with the recent renewed growth and technology advances in the fiber-optics industry.

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Automated fiber to waveguide alignment with XMS, VP and SR stages.
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Single mode fiber alignment with XMS and VP stage stack.
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5-axis aligner with TRA and NSA actuators.
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Optical network switch tester with CONEX-TRA.
  • Automated single or multi mode fibers alignment, laser to fiber or waveguide to fiber alignment
  • Silicon Photonics components test and alignment
  • Fiber Bragg Gratings, fiber spooling, couplers, optical splitters, switches and modulators
  • MEMS-based sensors, WDM and multi-channel waveguides testing

The Newport Difference

Minimum Incremental Motion (MIM), Bi-directional Repeatability and Accuracy are all important performance characteristics to achieve the maximum performance (i.e. maximum coupling efficiency) during alignment or test process of fiber optics components. Minimum Incremental Motion is the smallest motion a positioning device is capable of reliably moving. MIM is important for achieving good coupling efficiency as the sub-micron level movement in the X or Y-axes is required to align two fibers with minimum coupling loss. Bi-directional repeatability is ultimately important in alignment applications as it measures the system's capability to consistently move to the peak position from some other positions after a scan or some other task such as epoxy delivery. Newport motorized stages provide "guaranteed" performance specifications and help achieve the repeatable, stable alignment for maximum coupling efficiency with minimal setup time.

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Automation streamlines assembly and test

Auto-alignment system can be configured with motorized stages, XPS motion controller, optical detector, power meter and GBCS auto-alignment software. The automated alignment software is designed to align the fiber components by scanning in XYZ, recording the motion coordinates and the coupling power and then commanding the system to return to the optical peak position. Automated alignment software can be easily customized for specific application needs, providing options to analyze the other optical parameters for the device optimization such as output power, insertion loss, polarization dependence and etc.

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