Optics Communications 281 (2008) 5775–5778

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Optics Communications
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/optcom

Bend-optimized optical fiber with S+C+L bands for FTTH applications

Yu Cheng a,*, QingRong Han b, Jean-Noel Maran a
a
ORC, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
b
Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable, WuHan 430074, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A multi-clad waveguide, which provide more bandwidth for WDM with S+C+L bands, is illustrated in this
Received 13 May 2008 study. The bending loss is optimized for the FTTH applications. The fiber is manufactured by PCVD pro-
Received in revised form 18 August 2008 cess; the test results are identical with the theoretic calculation. This fiber has nearly flat dispersion from
Accepted 18 August 2008
1460 nm to 1625 nm. The MFD at 1310 nm and 1550 nm are 8.2 and 9.4 lm, respectively. Bending loss is
less than 0.1 dB/Turn at a bending radius of 7.5 mm. With low-water-peak manufacture technologies, the
fiber is suitable for FTTH applications.
Keywords:
Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
FTTH
Optical fiber
Waveguide
Bending loss

1. Introduction loss of the fiber is less than 0.1 dB with the bend radius of
7.5 mm at 1550 nm. The dispersion and MFD of the fiber are calcu-
With the rapid increasing demands for data, voice and video, Fi- lated in this paper to compare with the measured value.
ber to the home (FTTH) will be the goal of most carriers all over the
world. The passive optical network (PON) is becoming the most 2. Multi-clad waveguide design
interesting technology used in FTTH applications [1,2]. New tech-
nology has been developed for the FTTH applications. Special de- Multi-clad waveguide is rarely used for the reason of complex-
sign of optical fiber waveguide and coating system provide ness in design and manufacture. But some special fibers in tele-
reduced cost, innovative fiber [3]. A bend-optimized G.652 fiber communications, such as G.655 and DCF, make use of multi-clad
has been researched in Draka Comteq Optical Fiber company [4]. design for it provide much more flexible parameters and can be
A novel design of trench-Assisted Single Mode Fiber has been re- easy to achieve different optical properties of the fiber.
ported to be compatible with G.652 [5,6]. In recently, Holy fiber The multi-clad waveguide has effective refractive index (neff)
with special design has reported to have best bend insensitive between the ncore and the nC 1 . A bisection method is used to calcu-
property than common single mode fibers [7]. The next generation late the propagation constant bg. Bessel and modified Bessel Func-
PON is described as a 10 G WDM-PON, Hybrid WDM/TDM-PON, tions are employed to solve the Maxwell’s equations [10]
Long-reach PON [8]. High data rate, large capacity signals will be
bg
transferred through proper fiber in practice. Common silica fiber neff ¼ ð1Þ
still plays the main role in the optical communications. So a k0
bend-optimized common single mode fiber with S+C+L bands will k0 is the wave number in vacuum.
be one selection of the future’s network. Dispersion is calculated by the formula shown below:
In this paper, a novel waveguide, which is quite different from The total material dispersion Dm is defined as below [11]:
those mentioned above, is illustrated in detail. The novel wave- 2
guide will be a multi-clad waveguide with a higher core index kd n
Dm ¼  ð2Þ
compared with G.652. The multi-clad fiber meets the requirement c dk2
of G.657A if low-water-peak manufacture process is employed. where n is the refractive index of the material. The Sellmeier equa-
This fiber may be suitable for plasma chemical vapour deposit tion is employed to describe n:
(PCVD) process with low-water-peak technologies [9]. The bend
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
B1 k2 B2 k2 B3 k2
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 2380597673. n¼ 1þ 2 þ 2 þ 2 ð3Þ
E-mail address: yxc@orc.soton.ac.uk (Y. Cheng). k  C1 k  C2 k  C3

0030-4018/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.optcom.2008.08.042
5776 Y. Cheng et al. / Optics Communications 281 (2008) 5775–5778

The waveguide dispersion Dwg is defined as below:

2
z d neff
Dwg ¼  k ð4Þ
c dk2
Dtotal ¼ Dm þ Dwg ð5Þ
MFD is defined as below [12]:
R1
2 jwðrÞj2 rdr
d0 ¼ 8 R 01 ð6Þ
0
j dwðrÞ
dr
j2 rdr
where w(r) is the modal field distribution.
PCVD process is suitable to manufacture multi-clad waveguide
because it deposits thousands of thin layers of silica glass in hours
with precise composition of the material and refractive indices.
From the position 0mm to 10.5 mm in Fig. 1, core, clad C1 to C3,
and outer clad are defined, respectively. The core of the preform
is composed of GeO2+F doped SiO2, with a delta of 0.6%. The multi
clad from C1 to C3 has the delta of 0.4%, +0.21%, 0.1%, respec- Fig. 2. Fundamental mode profile for the multi-clad fiber and a SMF 28.
tively. More F than GeO2 is doped in the clad C1 to achieve a neg-
ative delta of 0.4%. The outer clad D is pure silica, with the
refractive index of 1.4571 in the preform.
Knowing the refractive index profile of the preform we can now
accurately calculate the optical modes sustain by the multi-clad fi-
ber. For these calculations we used a build-in finite element meth-
od (FEM) of Comsol which allow us to solve the wave equation for
an arbitrary refractive index profile. To maintain a good level of
accuracy we used the measured RIP shown at Fig. 1. For these sim-
ulations the core diameter of the fiber was 6.46 lm, the first, sec-
ond and third layer had a radius of 11 lm, 20 lm and 30 lm,
respectively. The outer diameter of the fiber was 125 lm. We first
calculated the fundamental mode of the multi-clad fiber for an
operative wavelength of 1550 nm. Fig. 2 shows the fundamental
mode profile for the multi-clad fiber and a SMF 28.
Fig. 2 clearly shows that the fundamental mode of the multi-
clad fiber has a better confinement into the core area than that
of the SMF 28. This result demonstrates the advantage of a mul-
ti-clad design over a classic step-index fiber for FTTH application.
Fig. 3. Confinement factor of the fundamental mode for the multi-clad fiber and
The multi-clad design induces a better confinement of the mode SMF 28.
into the core area, which obviously leads to lower bending losses.
IF the fundamental mode is more confined into the core area of the
fiber the amount of energy, which is going to be shifted into the Fig. 3 shows the confinement factor of the fundamental mode
cladding area, and lost, is going to be lower when the fiber is for the multi-clad fiber and the SMF 28. The confinement factor
bended. for the multi-clad fiber is always better than the one calculated
We decided to numerically evaluate the confinement factor the for the SMF 28 for the whole range of operative wavelength.
whole range of operative wavelength from 1200 nm to 1640 nm. Fig. 3 demonstrates the advantage of the multi-clad design which
We first defined the confinement factor as [13]: allows a better confinement factor which should leads to better
R 2p R a bending losses characteristics.
1
rðEx Hy  Ey Hx Þdrdu
C ¼ 2 R 20p R 1
0
1
2 0 0
rðEx Hy  Ey Hx Þdrdu 3. Results and analysis
where a is the core radius.
In the view of fiber diameter tolerance, different average core
diameter in the fiber with same outer diameter is simulated to
compare with the test results. The preform is jacketed with differ-
ent cross section, and then draws into fiber with the same outer
diameter of 125 lm. The parameters of sample 1#, 2#, 3# are de-
scribed in detail in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1
Diameter of different layers in the fiber

2a (lm) C1 (lm) C2 (lm) C3 (lm) D (lm)

1# 6.461 11.879 20.169 29.408 125
2# 6.369 11.71 19.941 28.991 125
3# 6.282 11.549 19.609 28.591 125
Fig. 1. Multi-clad refractive index profile of the preform (RIP).
 Y. Cheng et al. / Optics Communications 281 (2008) 5775–5778 5777

Table 2
Measured delta of different layers in the fiber

D2a DC 1 DC 2 DC 3 DD
1# 0.600 0.400 0.210 0.100 0
2# 0.600 0.400 0.210 0.100 0
3# 0.600 0.400 0.210 0.100 0

The diameters of different layers in the fiber are calculated and

shown in Table 1.
The refractive index differences of different layers in the fiber
are shown in Table 2.
The core diameter decreases from 6.461 lm to 6.282 lm but
the layers have the same ratio of C3:C2:C1:2a. The aim of the variety Fig. 4. Measured dispersion of the fiber.
of core diameter is try to find the stableness of the waveguide (see
Tables 3–6).
All fibers show nearly flat dispersion from 1460 nm to 1625 nm,
which means easy management of the dispersion for WDM system.
It can be concluded that the waveguide dispersion decreases as the
core diameter decreases since the material dispersion also the
same in three fibers. All fibers have zero dispersion wavelengths
between 1350 nm and 1390 nm in Fig. 4.
Bending loss of the fiber is less than 0.1 dB/Turn except 3#.
Bending loss increases rapidly with the decrease of the bending ra-
dius (see Figs. 5 and 6 ) ).
Microbend is another reason which adds additional loss to the
optical fiber application. A result of the microbend loss of the fiber
is shown as follows according to the method defined in Ref. [14]
(see Fig. 7).

Fig. 5. Bending loss of different fibers at 1550 nm.

Table 3
Measured dispersion of the fiber

Measured D1460 D1550 D1625 S1550

(ps/nm*km) (ps/nm*km) (ps/nm*km) (ps/nm2*km)
1# 4.06 5.558 5.775 0.009
2# 3.162 4.228 3.964 0.003
3# 3.11 3.586 4.023 0.002

Table 4
Theoretically calculated dispersion

Calculated D1460 D1550 D1625 S1550

(ps/nm*km) (ps/nm*km) (ps/nm*km) (ps/nm2*km)
1# 3.79 4.98 5.16 0.007
2# 2.54 3.41 3.46 0.0025
3# 1.12 1.74 1.77 0.0024

Fig. 6. Bending loss of different fibers at 1625 nm.

Table 5
Measured properties

Measured kcc (nm) MFD1310 (lm) MFD1550 (lm) MAC 1550 (nm)
1# 1276.5 8.423 9.736 7.627
2# 1246.9 8.334 9.466 7.592
3# 1232.1 8.293 9.446 7.667

Table 6
Theoretically calculated properties

Calculated Cut-off (nm) MFD1310 (lm) MFD1550 (lm) MAC 1550 (nm)
1# 1201 8.101 9.974 8.305
2# 1180 7.943 9.622 8.154
3# 1167 7.904 9.562 8.194

3# fiber shows a maximum MAC value (1550 nm) among these three fibers and has
the maximum bending loss both at 1550 nm and 1625 nm. Fig. 7. Microbend properties of the fiber.
5778 Y. Cheng et al. / Optics Communications 281 (2008) 5775–5778
Fig. 8. Typical loss spectra of the bend optimized fiber.
By using PCVD process to manufacture the Low Water Peak
bend optimized optical fiber, a typical loss spectra is shown above
(see Fig. 8).
The multi-clad fiber shows excellent microbend properties and
macrobend properties compared with standard single mode fiber.
With low water peak technology, the fiber can be used as a media
for DWDM in S+C+L bands.
1# and 2# fibers show flat dispersion, excellent bending loss,
suitable MFD and cut-off wavelength. The core Varity of 1# and
2# fibers is about 1.44%, which means the diameter of the whole fi-
ber variety is about 1.8micron. According to the state-of-the-art fi-
ber diameter control technologies, the precision is 125 ± 1 lm. So
we can have stable properties optical fiber even complex waveguide
is employed in the design and manufacture of innovative fiber.
4. Conclusions
An innovative fiber is illustrated in this study. The fiber has
nearly flat dispersion between 1460 nm and 1625 nm; provide
more bandwidth for WDM system. The bending loss of the fiber
is less than 0.1 dB/Turn at a bending radius of 7.5 mm. The MFD
of the fiber is about 8.2 and 9.4 lm at 1310 nm and 1550 nm,
respectively. The cable cut-off wavelength is less than 1290 nm.
With the low-water-peak manufacture technologies, the fiber will
be one of excellent fibers for the FTTH applications.
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