Hello, everyone!
Today, I would like to continue with the article on Plastic Optical Fiber (POF).
1. Regular Plastic Optical Fiber
Currently, different types of optical fiber are employed in the field. These types of fiber mainly include quarts optical fiber, glass optical fiber, and plastic optical fiber. Quarts optical fiber is suitable for long-distance transmission (over 1km).
The quarts optical fiber has two types:
Single-mode
Multi-mode with different core areas.
The telecommunication fiber is usually a single-mode fiber due to the requirement of high bandwidth, small dispersion, and polarisation mode dispersion. For office networks, multi-mode fiber can be employed due to its low cost. Glass optical fiber is mainly used along with POF for lighting. While polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) plastic optical fiber (POF), is used for short-distance electronic appliances and cars.
POF is an optical fiber that is made out of plastic. POF typically uses PMMA (acrylic), a general-purpose resin, as the core material, and fluorinated polymers for the clad material. In large-diameter fibers, the core comprises 96% of the cross-section to allow the transmission of light. The core size of POF is in some cases 100 times larger than glass fiber. Although quarts fiber is widely used for infrastructures and fiber to the home, POF has been called the "consumer" optical fiber because the fiber and associated optical links, connectors, and installation are all inexpensive.
In relation to the future request of high-speed home networking, there has been an increasing interest in POF as a possible option for next-generation Gigabit/s links inside the house. For telecommunications, the more difficult-to-use glass optical fiber is more common. This fiber has a core made of germania-doped silica. Although the actual cost of glass fibers is lower than plastic fiber, their installed cost is much higher due to the special handling and installation techniques required.
Fig. GI-POF attenuation.
2. Graded-Index Polymer Optical Fiber (GI-POF)
Perfluorinated graded-index polymer optical fibers (GI-POFs) can provide large bandwidth and low attenuation (60dB/km) at 850-1300nm, so it is a good replacement and a low-cost alternative to traditional glass. With the ease of use and affordability, GI-POFs make an excellent choice for the installation of high-performance fiber networks. In addition, GI-POFs provide a higher transmission bandwidth than any other type of plastic optical fiber.
Recently, a few 40Gb/s transmission experiments have been demonstrated. Until recently, all commercially available POFs have been fabricated from non-fluorinated polymers such as PMMA and, as a result, have had a refractive index that changes in steps. Although inexpensive, these fibers are characterized by large modal dispersion and typically operate at 530nm or 650nm, which is well outside of standard communication wavelengths (850nm or 1300nm), which is where high-speed transceivers are readily available.
Due to the high attenuation in the near-infrared, these fibers are restricted to low performance (<100Mb/s), short-range (<50m) applications in the visible region. With the advent of an amorphous perfluorinated polymer, polyperfluoro-butenylvinylether (commercially known as CYTOP®), the limitations presented by step-index POFs have been overcome.
Perfluorinated fiber exhibits very low attenuation in the near-infrared (~10dB/km) as shown in the Above Fig. Moreover, since the perfluorinated optical fiber can be constructed with a graded refractive index, it is capable of supporting bandwidths that are 100 times larger than those provided by conventional POFs. This is due to the interplay between high mode coupling, low material dispersion, and differential mode attenuation. Unlike conventional glass fibers, which suffer from high interconnection and receiver costs, perfluorinated GI-POFs are easy to install. To add a connector to glass fiber, the fiber needs to be cleaved using an expensive, specialized tool. Then, epoxy is used to attach the fiber to the connector hardware.
Finally, the assembled connector must be polished. In contrast, the GI-POF can be terminated using simple and inexpensive tools, connectors are crimped on, and polishing occurs in mere seconds, leading to a high-quality optical link in a fraction of the time. Moreover, GI-POFs are compatible with standard multimode glass fiber transceivers. As an example, the following table Table lists out the specification of the commercial GI-POF.
Table. Specification of GI-POF.
By using the new spectral efficiency modulation format, such as CML and OFDM, can furthermore increase the bandwidth of the GI-POF.
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