ÎçÒ¹¾ç³¡ University
A research team at ÎçÒ¹¾ç³¡ (President: Kohei Itoh), led by Project Professor Yasuhiro Koike, Director of the ÎçÒ¹¾ç³¡ Photonics Research Institute (KPRI), and Project Senior Assistant Professor Kenta Muramoto, both at the ÎçÒ¹¾ç³¡ Frontier Research & Education Collaborative Square (K-FRECS) at Shin-Kawasaki, has developed a graded-index plastic optical fiber (GI POF) for higher-speed short-reach optical interconnects and successfully demonstrated next-generation single-lane transmission at 212.5 Gbps (gigabits per second) over 50 meters.
With the proliferation of generative AI, the volume of data exchanged within data centers is growing, and higher-speed short-reach data links connecting computing devices are increasingly required. Such links commonly use a combination of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) and silica-glass-based multimode optical fibers (MMFs). However, further boosting per-lane data rates toward the 212.5-Gbps class is challenging because transmission bandwidth is constrained by modal dispersion and material dispersion in the optical fiber. In this work, the researchers demonstrated a GI POF that provides transmission bandwidth exceeding that of silica MMF by precisely controlling the refractive-index profile to reduce modal dispersion and by using a perfluorinated polymer with lower material dispersion than silica glass.
These results were accepted and presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2026, one of the world¡¯s largest international conferences in optical communications, as a co-authored paper by KPRI of ÎçÒ¹¾ç³¡ and Broadcom Inc.?
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