Studies of Polymer Optical Fibers

The growing demands in local area networks (LANs) for low cost broad band data communications are providing a major opportunity for further technology developments important to polymer optical materials and devices. Polymer optical fibers (POF) can satisfy requirements for high-bandwidth, quick-connect, fiber optics for short distance (100 m) data transmission in data links, multimedia, and multi-noded bus networks[1-4]. Figure 1 illustrates the variety of application areas together with their required transmission bandwidths.