Articlr

Plastic optical fiber (POF) is an inexpensive alternative to traditional copper cabling in office, home and automotive networks. It offers many benefits to the user. It is light, tough, affordable, and easy to install. It is also totally safe as it only uses a 650nm red LED light to diagnose if the link is good. Plus, it's totally immune to electromagnetic interference and noise, and emits no radiation. This is very important for video and voice streaming where noise can affect picture or service quality.

What's the difference between plastic optic fiber and the conventional optical fiber? They vary in material and core and cladding dimensions. The core is the very refractive center of the fiber which acts as a light guide. The core diameter is about 9 um and cladding diameter is 125 um for standard-telecommuncation single-mode fiber (SMF). Multi-mode fiber (MMF) uses a core/cladding diameter of 50 um/125 um usually. SMF is used in long-haul applications with transmission distances of up to 100 km, while the MMF can reach only an approximate distance of 2 km due to increased dispersion as a result of the larger diameter core.

But then again, contrary to both SMF and MMF, POF has a much larger core diameter at 980 um/1000 um. Although this results in lower data rates and reach, the larger core means the accuracy of alignment between the LED driver and fiber is less critical, to a point that even a slightly damaged fiber is still acceptable, meaning much less cost in production set up and alignment.

In contrast to standard fiber optic cable that offers lower attenuation as it uses a glass quartz core and cladding, the plastic optical fiber uses a polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) core and fluoropolymer cladding, making it tough and capable of enduring tighter bend radius than glass fiber optic cable. Whether it's glass fiber optics or plastic fiber optics, you will still likely require a media converter or a transceiver module to interface your networks.

POF can support data rates of 3 Gbps and above and is able to support Ethernet today. Ethernet is virtually entirely used as the lower layers in any office, home or factory networks. It is a low-cost, proven open standard, offering the bandwidth capacity and quality of service to support today's most challenging triple play (voice, video and data) services. POF is the answer to Ethernet networking because it's thin and flexible which makes it possible to be inconspicuously laid along baseboards and door frames, cut to the desired length, and safely self-terminated.

If you're looking for fiber optic transceivers designed to provide fast Ethernet over POF, you'll find a lot on the market. However, most transceivers don't have a common interface standard that's why you will need a gigabit converter or transceiver module that have multi-port switches well-suited for POF transceivers. With fiber optic devices like these, interfacing POF to Ethernet can be an easy job.