Tolerance design of optical micro-bench by statistical design of experiment

Design rule of optical micro-bench and tolerance of positional error of components assembled onto the bench are investigated in case of simple linear connections of incoming and outgoing optical fibers with and without ball lenses. Since there are many error variables with wide range of values that affects the optical coupling, the efficient array with reduced number of combinations is generated using statistical design of experiment and coupling efficiencies are calculated. From 3d B point, the tolerance of each position error is determined. For the fiber-to-fiber connection with ball lenses, the longitudinal and lateral positional errors have the strong interaction with each other to the coupling efficiency and thus should be be limited simultaneously.