University of Kiel and Discovery Semiconductors demonstrate first error-free 40 G transmission over plastic optical fiber

October 23, 2007, Ewing, NJ--Discovery Semiconductors has provided a multimode coupled 40 G (gigabit per second) photodiode to the University of Kiel in Germany for their research on high-speed optical communications over plastic optical fiber (POF) and multimode fiber (MMF). Researcher Stefan Schoellman demonstrated error-free 40 G transmission over 50 m of plastic optical fiber, work that was presented as a postdeadline paper at last month's European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in Berlin, Germany.

Werner Rosenkranz's group at the University of Kiel is conducting groundbreaking work to extend the data capacity of POF and MMF. Rosenkranz said, "This work demonstrates that 40 G transmission is possible over POF and MMF. These fiber types usually support only low bit rates. The multimode coupled photodiode from Discovery is a key enabling technology which allows 40 G transmission over POF."

Abhay Joshi, president and CEO of Discovery Semiconductors said, "MMF and POF are promising candidates for the increasing market of high-speed local area networks (LANs) and short optical interconnects in the high performance computing (HPC) environment. Since 2000, we have been manufacturing high-speed multimode coupled photodiodes and photoreceivers. The latest addition in this product line is the 40 G multimode coupled photodiode. This is the fastest commercially available multimode photodiode."

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