Realization of an Economical Polymer Optical Fiber Demultiplexer

Abstract

-Polymer Optical Fiber (POF) can be and are being used in various fields of applications. Two of the main fields are the automotive and the home entertainment sector. The POF can be applied in several different optical communication systems as automotive multi-media busses or in-house Ethernet systems.The requirements of bandwidth are increasing very fast in these sectors and therefore solutions that satisfy these demands are of high actuality. One solution is to use the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technique. Here, several different wavelengths can carry information over one POF fiber. All wavelengths that are transmitted over the fiber, must be separated at the receiver to regain and redirect the information channels. These separators are socalled Demultiplexers. There are several systems available on the market, which are all afflicted with certain disadvantages. But all these solutions have one main disadvantage, they are all too expensive for most of the applications mentioned above. So the goal of this study is to develop an economical Demultiplexer for WDM transmission over POF.The main idea is to separate the chromatic light in its monochromatic components with the help of a prism with low reciprocal dispersive power. The prism and the other assemblies, which are needed to adjust the optical path, should be manufactured in injection molding technique. This manufacturing technique is a very simple and economical way to produce a mass production applicable Demultiplexer for POF.

Use of a-SiC:H Photodiodes in Optical Communications Applications

“…For this reason, only the visible spectrum can be applied when using POF for communication. This limitation demands the design of new devices for the implementation of this technique using POF technology [S. Randel et al 2007, M. Haupt 2006. Several technical solutions for this problem are available, but none of them can be efficiently utilized in the POF application scenario described here, mostly because these solutions are all afflicted with high costs and therefore not applicable for mass production.…”

Low-Loss Hand-Made Demultiplexer using Transparent Color Filter in WDM-POF Network for Short-Haul Communication System

“…Common advantages of polymer optical fiber (POF) over copper cables are the nonexistent susceptibility to any kind of electromagnetic interference and it has lower weight. More than that, POF has smaller radius of curvature and is more flexible (Haupt et al, 2006). By using multimode type of optical fiber, signal transmission range is between 10Mbps to 10Gbps (Horak, 2007).…”