Design and fabrication of aspherical microlenses used for a USB fiber-optic connector

A universal serial bus (USB) type fiber-optic connector combined with aspherical microlenses is designed and fabricated to be applied for high data rate communications. This study presents an optimization design and evaluation of a microlens fiber-optic connector with high efficiently coupling the light from verticle-cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL). An aspherical microlens has a small diameter of about 780 μm and a numerical aperture of 0.275. The fabrication and assembly of the microlens fiber-optic connector have been considered. The optical coupling characteristics of the microlens fiber-optic connector are evaluated by Light Tools software with a coupling loss of-0.80 dB. After fabrication of the microlens fiber-optic connector, an optical coupling loss of -1.04 dB was achieved in experimental measurements. The experimental results are found to be in agreement with those yielded by the simulations.