A Converter for Transmission With Singlemode Performance on OM2/3/4/5 Multimode Fibers

A converter from a singlemode fiber to the fundamental mode of an OM2, OM3, OM4, or OM5 type multimode fiber is presented and is used to transmit 100 GbE with no detected errors over 1600 m multimode fiber using commercial transceivers. The converter is based on splicing a short length of few-mode fiber between the singlemode fiber and the multimode fiber. The few-mode fiber is designed so that the fundamental mode of the few-mode fiber has a good mode overlap with the fundamental mode of the multimode fiber. To suppress any higher order modes in the few-mode fiber, an optimized bend based mode stripper is used. The converter has a low loss of 0.35 dB, lower than previous reported solution. The converter do, opposite to previous suggested solutions, not include any free space part or mechanical connections, which assures low loss and cross talk as well as good long term stability.