Towards making child's play of POF interconnection

摘要

Copper wire and optical fiber are among the most widely used physical media for communications. They share many common traits, particularly as regards their interconnection. For example: they are often joined togetehr to create longer links, or to provide convenient access at physical boundaries, such as walls; at the ends of the links, they attach to sources and receivers of the signals to be transported. Both types of interconnections in both media have been implemented with connectors, which alow repeated mating and demating. Where permanent joining of two ends of the media were necessary, splices were used. Wire, however, has many additional forms of simple interconnection where very infrequent re-mating is anticipated, both at the link ends as well as within the link. An example of the former is the spring-loaded bare-wire terminal used on many hi-fi speakers and backs of audio receivers, and the latter is well represented by the wire nut. While these do not have counterparts in glass optical fiber interconnection, plastic optical fiber (POF) may well allow for analogous, low-cost interconnections. With such characteristics, including the high performance achieved by recently-developed fiber designs,~1 this plastic fiber has the potential for becoming a disruptive technology, as defined by Clayton Christiansen of the Harvard Business School.~2