The light emitted by 850 nm sources is absorbed by the GaAs substrate on which such sources are grown. Therefore, when such sources have to be flip-chip mounted on a carrier such as a CMOS chip, the GaAs substrate has to be removed completely. We present a novel concept for fabricating such thin-film bottom-emitting 850 nm sources, in which we use a fiber optic face plate as a new host substrate. We reveal experimental details about the first realization of arrays of such devices, and assess their properties