Multigigabit short-reach communication over microstructured polymer optical fiber

In contrast to conventional polymer optical fibers (POF) microstructured POF (mPOF) provide an additional opportunity to control the optical properties of the propagating signals. A particular arrangement of the air holes allows to reduce the number of waveguide modes and thus overcome the bandwidth limitation which is inherent for step-index POF. In this paper we report on the implementation of a 50 m data transmission link based on mPOF with a single ring of holes and a core diameter of 180 μm. A bit rate of 7 Gb/s was achieved at a bit-error ratio (BER) of 10−3 employing on-off keying modulation technique and an offline-processed symbol-spaced decision feedback equalizer. Discrete multitone modulation provided a bit rate of 8.07 Gb/s at BER of 10−3.