There is considerable interest in the use of multimode fibers for high bandwidth local area network applications, and they form part of the standard for Gigabit Ethernet. Multimode fibers provide a significant advantage over single-mode in their ease of alignment at connectors and for the coupling of sources and detectors. Another significant factor influencing the use of multimode fiber is that there is also a large installed base of 50μm and 62.5μm core fiber for core fiber for local area network (LAN) applications. The ability to integrate multimode fibers with free space optics would allow the construction of switching and routing fabrics for LANs. In this paper the coupling and propagation of the light from multimode fibers through multistage free-space optical systems will be considered. An optical relay system composed of plastic microlenses and optomechanics, which can be used to relay beams from multimode fibers will be presented and data transmission demonstrated.
展开▼
