Plastic fibers

Summary form only given. In “the last one mile” to the residential area, small core (5-10 μm diameter) of single-mode silica optical fibers requires highly accurate connectors, which seriously increases the cost of the whole system. The large-core polymer optical fiber (POF) has been extensively developed to solve the serious problem of fiber splicing and connection in the short distance communication because of its great flexibility, easy handling, and processing. The large core (such as 300 μm or more) of the POF would make it possible to adopt injection-molded plastic connectors, which dramatically decreases the total cost of the system without any complicated lens alignment. Very recently, the low-loss and high-bandwidth perfluorinated GI POF, which has no serious absorption loss from visible to 1.3-μm wavelength, was successfully prepared at Keio University. The status of the POF for high-speed data communication is reviewed in this tutorial