Design and characterization of large-core optical fiber for Light Peak applications

Bandwidth demand for transferring data among different consumer electronic products is increasing rapidly. Due to issues of high propagation loss, electromagnetic interference, and limited bandwidth- distance product of the present copper-based electrical cables, consumer electronic devices may not provide the bandwidth required for future high-capacity applications. The Intel Corporation has proposed Light Peak technology, allowing data transfer between electronic devices at 10 Gb/s in optical domain. To establish a reliable Light Peak connection, robust optical fiber is highly required. In this paper, we discuss the fabrication and characterization of a new type of 80-μm large-core optical fiber. We perform 10 Gb/s bit-error-rate measurements using 850 and 1550-nm transceivers. The results show that even though we have enlarged the fiber core diameter by 60% (from 50 to 80 μm) in order to increase the laser-to-fiber alignment tolerance, transmission bandwidth and distance required by Light Peak can still be achieved in this new type of large-core optical fiber.