170 Mb/s multilevel transmission over 115 m standard step-index plastic optical fiber using an integrated optical receiver

An optical receiver having a high linearity is used for multilevel communication over standard step plastic optical fiber. A large-diameter photodiode with an antireflection coating optimized for red light was integrated. These features enable the used optical receiver to be a promising plastic optical fiber receiver. An error free (< 10−8) 170 Mb/s data rate over 115 m standard PMMA step-index plastic optical fiber is achieved with four-level and eight-level pulse amplitude modulation.