Improved planar optical branching elements for multimode fibre transmission systems

The optical tapping and fan-out elements which we had previously fabricated for multimode fibre transmission systems all suffered from the serious drawback that the aging of the light-sensitive foil used in our simple planar technology resulted in a deterioration in the performance of structures using such foil as a planar waveguide. This paper introduces improved optical structures in which this drawback has been avoided while stil retaining the simple technique by which high fibre positioning accuracy is assured. In addition the overall insertion loss of the structures has been reduced to about 2 dB for the fan-out structure and 1.2 dB–1.5 dB for the access coupler.