Adhesives in the packaging of planar lightwave circuits

Planar lightwave circuits (PLCs) offer significant performance and cost saving advantages over other optical component technologies. However, the packaging of the PLCs has been a challenging task due to the stringent performance and reliability requirements posed by the telecommunication applications. In this paper, those requirements for the PLC-based optical components are outlined; how to use adhesives in the PLC packaging to address those requirements is discussed, such as using high-temperature adhesive to couple optical fibers to the PLCs and using low modulus adhesive to attach PLC die to the packaging case; detailed requirements to the adhesives for PLC packaging applications are listed. In addition, some results of the adhesives developed in our laboratory are presented. Those adhesives can warrant the packaged PLC devices meeting both performance and reliability requirements.