Basics of plastic optical fiber (POF)

What is Plastic Optical Fiber?

Plastic Optical Fiber, abbreviated POF, typically uses PMMA (acrylic), a general-purpose resin as the core material, and fluorinated polymers for the clad material.

In large-diameter fibers, 96% of the cross section is the core that allows the transmission of light.

Although quartz fiber is widely used for infrastructures, POF has been called the "consumer" optical fiber. This is due to the fact that costs of POF, associated optical links, connectors, and installation costs are low. It is being focused on for the following fields in particular:

Digital home appliance interfaces
Home networks
Car networks

Types of Optical Fiber

The material used for POF is typically PMMA. However, there are many other types of optical fiber. The individual characteristics of these fibers are applied to variety of fields.

Below is a list of the typical optical fibers mass-produced today.

Quartz optical fiber -- Suited for long-distance transmissions
- Single mode fiber (SMF) -- Widely used for communications
- Multi mode fiber (MMF) -- Used for office networks
Glass optical fiber
- Multi component glass optical fiber -- Widely used along with POF for lighting
Plastic optical fiber
- PMMA plastic optical fiber(POF) -- Consumer short-distance fiber for electronic appliances and cars
Other
- Polymer clad fiber -- Fiber with a quartz core and plastic clad

Note: Other types of plastic optical fiber have also been developed, such as fluorinated and polycarbonate.

Published with permission from:
MITSUBISHI RAYON CO., LTD.
Optical Fiber Department
6-41, Konan 1-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8506, JAPAN
Phone: +81 3 5495 3060