OREANDA-NEWS. Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. has developed a multi-core optical fiber including 8 cores in the standard 125-µm cladding suitable for optical interconnects, and realized an ultra-high-density fiber optic cable with the highest core density ever reported.

To cope with the growing data traffic in the short-reach interconnects used for parallel processing in supercomputers and resource disaggregation in data centers, optical interconnect technologies for broadband high-density transmission are intensively researched and developed. At the same time, the multi-core optical fiber (MCF) that has multiple cores in one fiber has been also intensively researched and developed. The MCF is expected as a next-generation optical fiber that can realize ultra-high-capacity transmission systems. Most of the ever-reported MCF developments had permitted the cladding diameter thicker than the standard 125-µm optical fibers to increase core count while realizing good optical properties of each core and suppressing core-to-core crosstalk.

Sumitomo Electric will continue the developments of various MCFs and related-technologies for their practical realization.

These results will be presented at the postdeadline paper session of Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC 2015, 22–26 March 2015, Los Angeles, California, USA), one of the largest conferences on optical fiber communications.