Vapor Phase Materials and Processes for Glass Optical Waveguides

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The first low loss glass optical waveguide fiber, 1 having an attenuation of 17 dB/km, was drawn from a glass blank, or preform, which had been fabricated by a vapor phase process. This success ultimately led to extensive technical efforts worldwide to develop vapor phase processes capable of providing practical glass fibers for the now burgeoning optical communications industry. This has proved to be a very effective and versatile fabrication approach. Single mode, step-index multimode, and graded-index multimode fibers have all been made by vapor phase techniques. Multimode fibers have been fabricated with bandwidths as high as 3 GHz, 2 and with total attenuations as low as 0. 5 dB/km, bordering on the intrinsic limits of the glasses used. 3 Of the more than 56 operating optical waveguide communication systems worldwide, 4 at least 50 use glass fibers made by a vapor phase process. Economic viability of glass fiber communications appears to be rapidly approaching as fabrication technology moves from the research laboratory into the production phase and further process improvements are made. Numerous important variations on vapor phase processes have been developed during the past eight years to achieve such impressive results. The purpose of this paper is to provide a tutorial and contemporaneous review of the key vapor processes under development.