Realization of an Economical Polymer Optical Fiber Demultiplexer

TL;DR

This paper presents a cost-effective polymer optical fiber demultiplexer using injection-molded prisms to separate wavelengths for WDM systems, aiming to meet increasing bandwidth demands in automotive and home entertainment applications.

Contribution

It introduces an economical demultiplexer design for POF WDM systems utilizing injection-molded prisms with low dispersive power, enabling mass production.

Findings

Successful design of an injection-molded prism-based demultiplexer.

Potential for low-cost mass production of POF demultiplexers.

Improved separation of wavelengths with simple manufacturing process.

Abstract

Polymer Optical Fiber (POF) can be and are being used in various fields of applications. Two of the main fields are the automotive and the home entertainment sector. The POF can be applied in several different optical communication systems as automotive multi-media busses or in-house Ethernet systems. The requirements of bandwidth are increasing very fast in these sectors and therefore solutions that satisfy these demands are of high actuality. One solution is to use the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technique. Here, several different wavelengths can carry information over one POF fiber. All wavelengths that are transmitted over the fiber, must be separated at the receiver to regain and redirect the information channels. These separators are so-called Demultiplexers. There are several systems available on the market, which are all afflicted with certain disadvantages. But all these solutions have one main disadvantage, they are all too expensive for most of the applications mentioned above. So the goal of this study is to develop an economical Demultiplexer for WDM transmission over POF. The main idea is to separate the chromatic light in its monochromatic components with the help of a prism with low reciprocal dispersive power. The prism and the other assemblies, which are needed to adjust the optical path, should be manufactured in injection molding technique. This manufacturing technique is a very simple and economical way to produce a mass production applicable Demultiplexer for POF.