High-Speed Graded-Index Plastic Optical Fibers and Their Simple Interconnects for 4K/8K Video Transmission

We developed a consumer-friendly interface graded-index plastic optical fiber (GI POF) cable with the ballpoint-pen interconnects for uncompressed 4K/8K video transmission of 120 Gb/s. Since the material dispersion of perfluorinated GI POF is smaller than that of silica multimode fiber (MMF) at 850-nm wavelength, the bandwidth achieved by GI POF is higher than that of silica MMF. Moreover, it is confirmed that by using GI POF with larger-scale microscopic polymer heterogeneities, serious noise problems observed in silica MMF are much improved by GI POF, which is achieved by resulting stronger mode coupling. This suggests that thinner 4K/8K cables can be feasible by using multilevel transmission through the low-noise GI POFs. The high-speed and low-noise GI POF is paving the way for consumer applications of 4K/8K optical interface toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.