Abstract

Star couplers in both active and passive form are becoming vital for many optical communication applications such as subscriber loop optical networks. Most reported active fiber star couplers are based on electrooptical switching in optical waveguides such as LiNbO₃.¹ Planarity of these devices, however, limits the number of fanout elements because of fabrication difficulties. In this paper, we propose a 3-D fiber star coupler based on a microlens array, as shown in Fig. 1, where modulation of individual light beams is provided by an array of liquid crystal elements.

© 1992 Optical Society of America