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The design of an alignment-detection system that uses off-axis diffractive elements and photodetectors is presented. The system was developed to detect the real-time misalignment of an array of optical beams as they pass through a microchannel relay. The design of this scheme is presented along with experimental results obtained from a prototype detection system.

A four-stage unidirectional ring flee-space optical interconnect system was designed, analyzed, implemented, and characterized. The optical system was used within a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor-self-electro-optic-effect-device-based optical backplane demonstrator that was designed to fit into a standard VME chassis. This optical interconnect was a hybrid microlens-macrolens system, in which the microlens relays were arranged in a maximum lens-to-waist configuration to route the optical beams from the optical power supply to the transceiver arrays, while the macrolens optical relays were arranged in a telecentric configuration to route optical signal beams from stage to stage. The following aspects of the optical system design are discussed: the optical parameters for the hybrid optical system, the image mapping of the two-dimensional array of optical beams from stage to stage, the alignment tolerance of the hybrid relay system, and the power budget of the overall optical interconnect. The implementation of the optical system, including the characterization of optical components, subsystem prealignment, and final system assembly, is presented. The two-dimensional array of beams for the stage-to-stage interconnect was adjusted with a rotational error of OCIS codes: 200.2610, 200.4650.

An interferometric alignment technique developed for the assembly of microchannel relay systems is described. The method uses pairs of diffractive lenslets that are arranged to form compact in situ interferometers. The relative transverse, longitudinal, and rotational alignment of the two lenslet arrays can be quantitatively determined from the resulting interference patterns. The theoretical analysis is compared with the experimental performance. Key words: Alignment, interferometric, lenslet array packaging