OFS launches few-mode fibers series

At this week's OFC/NFOEC 2013 in Anaheim, CA, fiber-optic specialist OFS announced the launch of a series of few-mode fibers designed for space division multiplexing.

“Few-mode fibers can be used for space division multiplexing where information is transmitted simultaneous on several modes thereby further increasing the transmission capacity of an optical fiber,” explains Robert Lingle Jr., director of fiber design and systems research at OFS. “Spatial multiplexing on few mode fibers is one of the very hot research topics at this year’s OFC,” he adds.

Related: NEC, Corning burst petabit transmission over single optical fiber

The new few-mode fibers from OFS include three versions: a two-mode fiber with graded-index core, which has a low differential group delay; a step-index two-mode fiber; and a step-index four-mode fiber.

“The OFS few-mode fibers have been developed as a part of OFS participation in the European Union supported collaborative research and development project MODE-GAP,” notes Bera Pálsdóttir, manager of Incubation Center OFS Denmark. “The fibers have been tested by our business partners at ModeGap, already resulting in several publications, with the demonstration of transmission of 57.6 terabit per second (Tbps) using 6 spatial modes being the most impressive result thus far."

More details on the ModeGap project can be found at the website http://modegap.eu/.

See also: Dual-core nanomechanical fibers replicate optical switching functions