Progress of plastic optical fiber technology

The status of the polymer optical fiber (POF) for high-speed data communication is reviewed. Very recently, the low-loss and high-bandwidth perfluorinated GI POF which has no serious absorption loss from visible to 1.3-/spl mu/m wavelength was successfully prepared at Keio University. Since the core diameter (300-1000 /spl mu/m) of the GI POF is much larger than that of the multimode silica fiber (62.5 /spl mu/m), the serious modal noise in the conventional multimode silica fiber was virtually eliminated, resulting in stable giga bit order data transmission with inexpensive couplers and connectors.