Morganville, NJ--For those many photonics professionals who use optical fibers for purposes other then standard communications, Vytran has built a prototype low-loss optical fiber splicer for splicing standard, large-diameter and specialty fibers; Vytran will demo the tool at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO; San Jose, CA) at its booth (#1324) from May 18 to 20. The splicer, called the LFS-4000, has been designed for volume production of fiber assemblies for fiber-laser, sensing, medical-device, fiber-optic gyroscope, and fiber-based instrumentation applications.
Jean-Michel Pelaprat, Vytran's president and CEO, notes that the stand-alone tool is aimed at applications such as fiber-laser manufacturing, where production technicians must make several precision splices per fiber-assembly unit in high volumes. The cleaver has a simplified user interface and is compatible with Vytran's fiber cleavers.
The LFS-4000 uses Vytran's filament-fusion technology to produce low-loss splices on fibers ranging from 125 to 900 microns in diameter. It can be used for standard and specialty fibers such as doped fibers, polarization maintaining (PM) fibers, photonic-crystal fiber (PCF), highly stressed fibers, and D shapes. Its PC-based software has two complementary interfaces--one tailored for product development that allows all of the unit's functionalities, and another simplified interface that allows only basic operation for volume manufacturing. Vytran plans to make the LFS-4000 available at the beginning of Q3.
