FIBEROPTICS/OPTOELECTRONIC COMPONENTS
Corning Incorporated (Corning, NY) first offered its LEAF optical fiber for sale at the February 1998 Optical Fiber Communication conference. LEAF fiber, with a large effective area in the 1550-nm window and excellent bend performance, represents the next generation of nonzero-dispersion-shifted optical fiber. It offers higher power-handling capability, higher signal-to-noise ratio, longer amplifier spacing, and maximum flexibility for DWDM. By uniformly reducing nonlinear effects such as four-wave mixing, self-phase modulation, and cross-phase modulation, it overcomes the greatest performance limitation in DWDM systems. The LEAF design also facilitates the migration to the 1565-1625-nm wavelength window, where, along with the standard 1530-1565-nm window, it can handle more channels by reducing nonlinear effects. The fiber is capable of operating with current 16-channel, 10-Gbit/s systems and is being upgraded to future 40-channel, 10-Gbit/s systems, making it the fiber of choice for many high-capacity networks under construction today or considered for the future.