Plastic optical passive devices and their application to a local computer network

Economical plastic optical passive devices have been fabricated and their application to a local computer network has been proposed. A six-port polymer waveguide star coupler with precision-molded optical connectors has been found to have an excess loss of 3.1 dB with a power variation of ±0.9 dB. The precision molded plastic connectors have shown a low connection loss for fiber connection and a high coupling efficiency for LED coupling. A personal computer star network system using these plastic optical passive devices has been demonstrated with a maximum transmission distance of 2 km and high promise of economical network systems have been confirmed.