High efficiency optical concentrator for plastic optical fiber communication

摘要

Recently, FTTH service became more common and the number of FTTH subscriber has been increasing. So, high-speed network in households is the key technology in order to spread FTTH service widely. POF is the best medium if high-speed communication is needed in the home, because it has easy handling easer than silica fiber, and transmission speed through POF is over 1Gbps[1]. A novel high efficiency optical concentrator has been developed to connect the POF to the PIN-PD (PIN photodiode). The concentrator achieved much easier alignment of optical axis between a POF and a PIN-PD. The shape of the optical concentrators was designed by ray-trace simulation, in order to focus the light to PIN-PD effectively. In this experiment, we used two types of the concentrators which had parabolic shape and ellipsoidal shape respectively, because higher performances had been obtained by parabolic shape of concentrator and ellipsoidal shape of concentrator in the ray-trace simulation. On the other hand, we employed GI-POF and SI-POF, because GI-POF is essential for achieving a high speed data transmission over IGbps and SI-POF is heavily used in automotive. As the result, the coupling loss of 0.36dB between GI-POF and PIN-PD was obtained by using the ellipsoidal concentrator. And the coupling loss of 1.43dB between SI-POF and PIN-PD was obtained by using the ellipsoidal concentrator. The result showed that the concentrator performed more efficiently than current lens system.