CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a § 371 national stage of PCT International Application No. PCT/CN2019/107492, filed Sep. 24, 2019, claiming priority of Chinese Patent Application No. 2018112382749, filed Oct. 23, 2018, the contents of which is hereby incorporated by reference into the application.

FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY

The embodiments of the present disclosure relate to the technical field of optical fiber transmission, and in particular, to an optical fiber array.

BACKGROUND

At present, with the fast development of communication technology and the rapid growth of its practical applications, the research of high-capacity optical fiber communication systems has great application value. As the demand for long-distance information transmission becomes greater, optical fibers are used more and more widely, and the demand for the use of optical fiber array is also augmenting. In an optical fiber array, multiple optical fibers are mounted on a substrate by V-grooves and a lid plate is covered on the optical fibers for fixation.

Optical fiber arrays are widely used in optical devices. By using optical splitter chips and optical fiber arrays with different channels, corresponding optical splitters with different branching ratios such as 1:4, 1:8, 1:16 and 1:32 can be produced. For optical transmission network equipment, the use of dynamic reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) technology can flexibly expand network capacity and reduce operating costs. Currently, wavelength selective switch (WSS) is a technical option for RODAM technology implementation. For 1×N WSS, 1 means the public port (i.e., the COM port), and N means the branch port. When a group of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) signals enter from the COM port, the group of WDM signals are split according to the optical wavelength, and then depending on system requirements, each wavelength is routed to one of the N branch ports via WSS. Conversely, WSS can also take the N branch ports as input and the common port as output for beam combination.

For the light beam transmission in traditional optical fiber arrays, light beams are transmitted on the same plane; whereas, in a novel WSS system, due to the use of special crystals, it is necessary to make the distribution of the input light beams on the cross section correspond to a certain curve form, namely, the input light beams are not transmitted on the same plane. The traditional optical fiber arrays, however, are not able to output light beams whose distribution on the cross section matches a certain curve form, and hence they cannot be used as the input of the WSS system.

Therefore, there is an urgent need to provide an optical fiber array capable of outputting light beams whose distribution matches a certain curve.

SUMMARY

In order to solve or at least partially solve the problems above, the embodiments of the present disclosure provide an optical fiber array.

The embodiments of the present disclosure provide an optical fiber array, comprising: a substrate, a lid plate and a preset number of optical fibers:

the substrate is provided with the preset number of first-type V-grooves, the lid plate is provided with second-type V-grooves matched with each first-type V-groove, and each optical fiber is fixed by a first-type V-groove and a matched second-type V-groove:

the distribution of cores of the preset number of optical fibers on a port cross-section of the optical fiber array matches a preset curve.

For an optical fiber array provided by the embodiments of the present disclosure, a preset number of optical fibers are fixed by a substrate and a lid plate each provided with V-grooves, and the distribution of fiber cores of the preset number of optical fibers on a port cross-section of the optical fiber array matches a preset curve, such that light beams transmitted and output through the optical fiber array are not transmitted on the same plane, and correspond to required positions on the preset curve. Accordingly, the optical fiber array meets application requirements of a novel WSS system, and can be widely used in the novel WSS system and in other scenarios having special requirements of light beam positions.

