OFS has improved important geometry specifications for its family of LaserWave multimode fibers, thereby reducing connector loss and improving link system performance. The enhancements can provide extra margin, or “headroom,” in 40, 100 and 400 Gbps applications, enabling greater network design flexibility and reliability. The improvements were achieved through the use of OFS’ patented Modified Chemical Vapor Deposition (MCVD) fiber manufacturing process.
The improved specifications are supported by OFS’ LaserWave WideBand (OM5), LaserWave FLEX 550 (OM4) and LaserWave FLEX 300 (OM3) fibers. OFS said these improvements include:
- Clad diameter tolerance has been tightened from 125.0 ± 0.8 μm to 125.0 ± 0.7 μm
- core non-circularity has been improved from ≤5.0% to ≤2.5%.
- Core/clad concentricity has been tightened from ≤1.0 μm to ≤0.7 μm
Modeling of simulated connections conducted by OFS indicates that the tighter specifications can result in average insertion loss improvement of 0.07 dB per connection compared to industry standard fiber. The model distribution also shows that 97% of insertion losses would be below 0.25 dB using LaserWave fiber, but 0.40dB using standards compliant fiber. As loss budgets drop below 2 dB for 40, 100, and 400 Gb/s network, this improved insertion loss performance is critical for links containing multiple connections.
