Fiber Bundle Scanning Switch

Conventional optomechanical fiber-optic switches that use individually lensed fibers do not scale gracefully to 100. We present a switch where the input and all output fibers are held in a fiber bundle and share a common imaging lens. Output is switched by a reflective scanner that uses prism rotation to achieve 0.1- m spatial resolution. The fiber locations in a disordered bundle are mapped during a setup procedure and stored in a lookup table for operation. We demonstrate a 1 160 switch in an 11 3 4.25 optomechanical package with 20 ms response, 3.5 dB maximum insertion loss, and 0.02 dB switched connection stability. We discuss how this prototype can be developed into a compact and inexpensive 1 4096 switch.