Abstract
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. © 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).