Potential of High Speed, Short Distance Optical Data Communication on Large Diameter Optical Fibers

Optical communication systems offer a big number of advantages compared with wireless and copper based systems: no EMI, high capacity and potential free connection. The big disadvantages are the difficult installation and the price of the active components. The use of thick optical fibers like polymer optical fibers or polymer clad silica fibers enables very simple installation and packaging technologies. Some market available POF solutions can be applied without any connectors. Due to the large core diameter, the electrical capacity of the photo diode is relatively high. This limits the bandwidth of the receiver. The second big limit is the mode dispersion in the high NA step index type fibers. For a long time it was believed, that the maximum possible data rate is about 200 Mbit/s for POF. This paper shows that different POF and PCS can be used for bit rates of up to 2.5 Gbit/s with optimized components. The different kinds of fibers (polymer and hybrid; step index, multi step index, graded index and multi core) were presented and compared. Finally the paper shows the possible performance of the different fibers (e.g. 2 Gbit/s over 100 m of PMMA-GI-POF and 1 Gbit/s over 500 m of semi-GI-PCS) as well as possible applications for digital and analog data transmission