Doug Coleman

Design of universal fiber with demonstration of full system reaches over 100G SR4, 40G sWDM, and 100G CWDM4 transceivers

Universal fiber has an LP01 mode field diameter approximately matched to that of standard single mode fiber, while being a multimode fiber. We analyzed the dependence of the mode field diameter on the core diameter for different core delta values. Guided by the analysis, a universal fiber having a delta of 1.2% was fabricated, showing significantly reduced coupling loss of ~2.3 dB with conventional multimode fiber. We demonstrated that the fiber can transmit with full system reach in both single mode and VCSEL-based multimode transmissions, including 100G SR4, 40G sWDM, and 100G CWDM4 for the first time.

Evaluation of extended reach capability of 40G BiDi VCSEL-based WDM transmission over OM4 multimode fibers

40G BiDi is a commercial WDM transceiver with duplex LC connectivity for transmissions over multimode fibers. In this paper, we evaluate the transmission performance of 40G BiDi over OM4 fibers. We have carefully selected OM4 fibers with the lowest and highest peak wavelengths around 850 nm to evaluate the reach capability for 40G BiDi transmission. We demonstrated that the OM4 fiber with the lowest peak wavelength can transmit error free over 325 m while the OM4 fiber with the highest peak wavelength can transmit up to 350-390 m. In both cases, the maximum lengths are much longer than 150 m and 200 m specified for OM4 and wideband MMF transmissions, respectively. We also measured the transceiver encircled flux and found that it was tighter than the encircled flux standard, which may be a factor favoring long system reach at 900 nm.

Universal fibers for data center applications

In this paper, we present a new type of optical fiber, called universal fiber, which can be used for both multimode and single mode transmissions. The fiber is a multimode fiber that has an LP01 mode field diameter approximately matched to that of standard single mode fiber. First, we will present the universal fiber design concept and discuss design tradeoffs for both single mode and multimode operations. Then we will show characterizations of a preliminary experimental fiber and present system testing results with 110 m, 150 m and 2700 m system reach using 100G SR4, 40G sWDM multimode and 100G CWDM4 single mode transceivers, respectively, which demonstrate both multimode and single mode transmission capabilities of universal fiber.