In these assemblies, fibers at one end of the cable are arranged in a two-dimensional (2D) pattern. The pattern may be of arbitrary complexity, limited only by the customer's imagination. However, once the issues of design, fabrication, and assembly are considered, frequently what is achievable is a trade-off between the desired performance, limitations of current machining technologies, and the customer's budget.

2D arrays may take several basic forms (in order of increasing complexity and cost):

• a regular rectangular grid of tightly packed fibers;
• an array of linear arrays;
• a regular rectangular grid of fibers spaced in both dimensions;

These assemblies have a multitude of applications:

• multi-channel spectroscopy
• astronomy
• high throughput sampling
• biomedical imaging

Again, fibers from such an array may be routed, selected, ordered in arbitrary sequences, and divided into multiple branches.

Examples