Optical fibre transmission lines

Summary

Optical fibre transmission lines have many advantages over coaxial cables. The most widely used fabrication techniques involve chemical vapour deposition resulting in losses of well below 1 dB/km. Analysis of propagation follows well-defined principles and the results obtained are broadly comparable with those at microwave frequencies, although the wavelength of operation, ~1 μm, is much shorter. By suitable design single-mode fibres can be made to give bandwidth x length products approaching 100 GHz.km. Multimode fibres are now well understood, pose fewer problems and can be excited with light-emitting diodes.

The Radio and Electronic Engineer (1981) Vol.51(7) pp.313-325

doi: 10.1049/ree.1981.0048

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