Measurement of transmission characteristics of plastic fiber

Using Cyclic Transparent Optical Polymer (CYTOP), a perfluorinated graded index fiber, different transmission characteristics were investigated. Graded index perfluorinated fibers can support multi-Gb/s date rates form 0.83 um to 1.3 um. High bit rates can be obtained over 0.5 um wavelength range where optical transmitter and receivers technologies are already matured. A distributed feedback laser source at 1.3 um and a low cost InGaAs detector had been used in an error free transmission for both modulated multichannel transmission and directly modulated digital transmission for both modulated multichannel transmission and directly modulated digital transmission at 2 Gb/s. Two data channels at 145 Mb/s are mixed using binary phase shift keying BPSK modulation technique index of 5.3 percent. Also, the dispersion power penalty of the CYTOP fiber was measured and found to be less than 1 dB suggesting that the fiber induced distortion is small.