10-Gb/s Transmission Over 10-m SI-POF With ${M}$ -PAM and Multilayer Perceptron Equalizer

We demonstrate the gigabit-per-second transmission over a step-index plastic optical fiber (SI-POF) of 10-m length with a pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM). A multilayer perceptron-based equalizer is used to mitigate an intersymbol interference and non-linearity in the system. Using this equalizer with 32-PAM, a data rate of 10 Gb/s is achieved over the 10-m SI-POF at a bit error rate of 10
^-2
, which is below the 20% forward error correction limit.