In-plane and out-of-plane couplers for optical printed circuit boards and optical backplanes

We present an optical printed circuit board with embedded standard multimode glass fibers. Light is coupled into and out of the glass fibers using special coupling elements, which provide a purely passive alignment on the fiber ends. Two different coupling elements are presented, an active in-plane coupler with a laser or photodiode and a passive out-of-plane coupler to deflect light by 90° out of the plane of the optical printed circuit board.