Kouki Hirano

Bidirectional optical coupler for plastic optical fibers

We have developed a low-loss bidirectional optical coupler for high-speed optical communication with plastic optical fibers (POFs). The coupler, which is fabricated by an injection molding method that uses poly (methyl methacrylate), has an antisymmetric tapered shape. We show that the coupler has low insertion and branching losses. The tapered shape of the receiving branch reduces beam diameter and increases detection efficiency coupling to a photodetector, whose area is smaller than that of the plastic optical fiber. The possibility of more than 15-m bidirectional transmission with a signaling bit rate up to 500 Mbits/s for simplex step-index POFs is demonstrated.

Aberration properties in a chirped grating for coarse wavelength division demultiplexing

We studied the imaging performance of a chirped grating for a demultiplexer designed for coarse wavelength division multiplexing using a wavefront aberration analysis and the ray tracing simulation. The demultiplexer was composed of a chirped grating, cylindrical lenses, and a waveguide. The best image point and the spot shape focused by the chirped grating were effectively calculated with the wavefront aberration. We applied the aberration analysis to design a waveguide to connect branched beams to photodetectors, and we confirmed the demultiplexing performance experimentally.

Segmented chirped grating for coarse wavelength division demultiplexing with multimode optical fibers

A chirped grating segmented into partitions each having a constant blaze angle to use in a demultiplexer for coarse wavelength division multiplexing with multimode optical fibers is developed. Its designed configuration utilizes a resonance region to achieve high diffraction efficiency and large dispersion. The width, blaze angle, and diffraction order of each partition were optimized by vector diffraction analysis. The diffraction loss of the manufactured grating was less than 1.5 dB, and polarization-dependent loss was less than 0.6 dB within a wavelength width of at least 70 nm. It is confirmed that a demultiplexer with the developed chirped grating had a wide passband and low cross talk.