Polymer fiber image guide optical circuits that incorporate free-space add-drop components

We further extend the capability of a polymer-fiber-image-guide-(PFIG-) based optical circuit from a pure point-to-point interconnect scheme to a general-purpose optical network with data-branching capabilities. Two-dimensional array data can be inserted and taken away at free-space add-drop nodes, which are implemented with free-space minioptical components. A four-node hybrid circuit with PFIG's to transmit bit-parallel data and free-space components to perform add-drop is experimentally demonstrated.