Abstract: A thin chip having parallel, evenly spaced optical fiber-receiving grooves on at least one side forms the basic building block for a certain prior art multilayer optical fiber connector. The end arrays of fiber groups assembled within stacks of such chips are substantially identical in spacing, thus enabling a gang splice to be achieved with a simple abutment of the two end arrays. The present disclosure achieves vertical spacing between layers, as well as horizontal fiber spacing in a given layer, by including in the base of each chip a thin layer of compliant material to urge the fibers housed in the adjacent chip into their respective grooves. The compliance is sufficient to permit vertically adjacent chips to contact each other rather than to float atop fibers. The splice array additionally uses a key chip which rests upon a vertical reference surface with one end contacting a horizontal reference surface. These surfaces may form part of the permanent splice.