The design, fabrication, and characteristic of the plastic optical fiber (POF), beam splitter, for the automotive network, has been demonstrated. The fabricated 1×2 POF beam splitter consisted of a poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA) core, which had a structure of circular waveguide and a diameter of 0.98 mm, UV curable epoxy (PC-414) clading of 0.02 mm thickness, and three POF pigtails with multimedia oriented system transport standard ferrules. A 1×2 PMMA waveguide, which was designed to have an optimal angle of 15.8 deg at the beam splitting point, was fabricated using the injection molding method for mass production. The total volume of the fabricated 1×2 POF beam splitter is 48×18×12 mm3 with 1.2 m length input and output POF pigtails. From the measurement results, we experimentally confirm that the fabricated 1×2 POF beam splitter has excellent properties such as a beam splitting ratio of 50:50 ± 10 % and excess loss of less than 3.52 dB and it works well up to 250 Mbps for the automotive network.
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