Plastic optical fibers: Technologies and communication links

This chapter describes plastic optical fiber (POF) design and fabrication along with specific fiber properties of attenuation, bandwidth, and thermal stability. POF consists of a plastic core surrounded by a plastic cladding of a refractive index lower than that of the core. They are quite flexible and have very large core diameters compared to glass optical fibers. These features enable easy installation and safe handling. The large-core fibers can be connected without high-precision accuracy and with low cost. POFs were earlier used as the transmission medium in the data bus within automobiles. Now, they are used extensively in short-distance datacom applications, such as digital audio interfaces. They are also used for data transmission within equipment and for control signal transmission in machine tools. In the future, high-speed communication will be required in the home, and POFs are a promising candidate for home network wiring. Various communication applications and recent developments in graded-index POFs are discussed.