Plastic Optical Fiber Applications Research Articles

Optical Fibers in the Design and Fabrication of Smart Garments – a Review

Several publications and even commercial products showcasing the application of optical fibers for textile goods abound in literature. Optical fibers can be employed as sensors by making use of physical principles to sense strain, temperature, and other quantities by tailoring the fiber such that the quantity to be measured alters the intensity, phase, polarisation, and wavelength of light within the fiber. However, a paper directed at the development of textile based applications or smart garments using optical fibers is lacking. This review seeks to serve as apt reference material for the development of optical fiber based textile sensors or smart garments with a focus on the application of plastic optical fibers (POFs). Highlighted are the salient material properties of POFs and their importance in delivering satisfactory sensing results. Special treatment has also been given to their proposed feasibility for embedment within weft knitted structures.

Crack monitoring capability of plastic optical fibers for concrete structures

Optical fibers have been widely used in structural health monitoring. Traditional silica fibers are easy to break in field applications due to their brittleness. Thus, silica fibers are proposed to be replaced by plastic optical fibers (POFs) in crack monitoring in this study. Moreover, considering the uncertainty of crack propagation direction in composite materials, the influence of the angles between fibers and cracks on the monitoring capability of plastic optical fibers is studied. A POF sensing device was designed and the relationship between light intensity loss and crack width under different fiber/crack angles was first measured through the device. Then, three-point bend tests were conducted on concrete beams. POFs were glued to the bottom surfaces of the beams and light intensity loss with crack width was measured. Experimental results showed that light intensity loss in plastic optical fibers increased with crack width increase. Therefore, application of plastic optical fibers in crack monitoring is feasible. Moreover, the results also showed that the sensitivity of the POF crack sensor decreased with the increase of angles between fibers and cracks.

Realization of optoelectronic integrated transmitter and receiver for POF Applications

The optoelectronic integrated transmitter and receiver for 650nm plastic optical fiber (POF) communication applications realized in 0.5μm BCD (Biplor, CMOS and DMOS) process is first described in this paper. The 650nm resonant cavity light emitting diode (RCLED) is used as light source. It is first proposed for optoelectronic integration of the transmitter by bonding RCLED to the driver chip. Temperature compensation technology is employed in the driver circuit to compensate for the modulation current. In the monolithic optoelectronic integrated receiver, large area multi-finger PIN photodetector (PD) that is compatible with standard IC process, transimpedance amplifier and post amplifier are presented. Measurement results show that the responsivity and capacitance of PD is 0.25A/W and 5pF, respectively. The sensitivity of receiver is −14.6dBm at 180Mb/s and BER is less than 10−9 for 650nm input light by POF. A clear eye diagram is demonstrated for 180Mb/s PRBS. These indicate that optoelectronic integrated chips can be employed in high-speed POF-based Fast Ethernet systems for broadband access network applications.

A High-Speed Fully-Integrated POF Receiver With Large-Area Photo Detectors in 65 nm CMOS

This paper describes the design of a multi-gigabit fiber-optic receiver with integrated large-area photo detectors for plastic optical fiber applications. An integrated 250 μm diameter non-SML NW/P-sub photo detector is adopted to allow efficient light coupling. The theory of applying a fully-differential pre-amplifier with a single-ended photo current is also examined and a super-Gm transimpedance amplifier has been proposed to drive a C PD of 14 pF to multi-gigahertz frequency. Both differential and common-mode operations of the proposed super-Gm transimpedance amplifier have been analyzed and a differential noise analysis is performed. A digitally-controlled linear equalizer is proposed to produce a slow-rising-slope frequency response to compensate for the photo detector up to 3 GHz. The proposed POF receiver consists of an illuminated signal photo detector, a shielded dummy photo detector, a super-Gm transimpedance amplifier, a variable-gain amplifier, a linear equalizer, a post amplifier, and an output driver. A test chip is fabricated in TSMC's 65 nm low-power CMOS process, and it consumes 50 mW of DC power (excluding the output driver) from a single 1.2 V supply. A bit-error rate of less than 10-12 has been measured at a data rate of 3.125 Gbps with a 670 nm VCSEL-based electro-optical transmitter.

Monitoring of the concrete curing process using plastic optical fibers

In this paper we propose the application of plastic optical fiber to monitor the concrete curing process.The proposed method is based in the scattering of the propagated optical signal in grooves imposed to the fiber. By monitoring the intensity of the transmitted light signal, along time, we can determine the cement setting rate along all the curing period. The obtained results show that the system has enough sensitivity to analyze a curing period of 28days, where the received optical power is 5% of the initial value.

Design of 250-Mb/s Low-Power Fiber Optic Transmitter and Receiver ICs for POF Applications

This paper describes 250-Mb/s fiber optic transmitter and receiver ICs for plastic optical fiber applications using a 0.18-Jlm CMOS technology. Simple signal and light detection schemes are introduced for power reduction in sleep mode. The transmitter converts non-return-to-zero digital data into 650-nm visible-red light signal and the receiver recovers the digital data from the incident light signal through up to 50-m plastic optical fiber. The transmitter and receiver ICs occupy only 0.62 mm

Design and Implementation of a Photo Detector Using a Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor

In this paper, we present a photo detector using a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) for plastic optical fiber (POF) applications. Generally, the PIN photodiode and optical receiver front-end circuit are made from III-V compound materials, such as GaAs, InP, and HEMT (High Electron Mobility Transistor), due to their high speed and low noise characteristics. However, silicon deep-submicron CMOS technology is more attractive due to its low cost and high integration capacity. A PIN photodiode using a CMOS suers from a low responsivity (R) a slow spreading speed of drift and diusion current generated by photon. To overcome the low responsivity of the CMOS PIN photodiode, we exploit a PN junction between the N-well and the P-substrate. We propose a finger-shaped arrangement of the P-substrate to compensate for the slow spreading speed of the drift currents. The implemented CMOS PIN photodiode exhibits 0.12-A/W responsivity and 4.5-pF parasitic capacitance. Also, the optical receiver front-end circuit for the POF applications is integrated with the CMOS PIN photodiode. The designed photo detector exhibits a 112-MHz 3-dB bandwidth and consumes only 3-mA of DC current from a single 3.3 V supply voltage.