Japanese boffins say they've created plastic optical fibres to reach places that might break glass
- Reference: 1632463325
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/09/24/plastic_optical_fibers/
- Source link:
Optical fibers are most often made of glass and are, as attested by the awesome data-schlepping capacity of undersea cables, freaking amazing.
But while boffins have made optical fibers very resilient, they've not been able to address all the fragilities in glass.
[1]
Enter Professor Yasuhiro Koike of the University’s Photonics Research Institute, which today [2]announced it has created polymer optic fibers that can carry data at 53Gbps – and do that while bending. Critically, the materials are said to have less requirement for forward error correction than conventional fibers. That means less capacity is devoted to error-correction overheads, allowing more signal and less noise and/or noise removal effort.
[3]
There is, of course, a caveat: this tech can't carry data over long distances. The boffins are most comfortable using the polymer fibers to carry data a few tens of meters.
[4]Imagine a fiber optic cable that can sense it's about to be dug up and send a warning
[5]319 terabits – great Scott! Boffins in Japan speed along information superhighway at new world record
[6]Ethernet standards wonks eye up speeds beyond 400Gb/s
But that's enough distance to put polymer optical fiber to work in a datacentre. Or a car – an environment in which components are subjected to just the sort of vibrations and bumps that trouble glass.
Which is not to say that glass optical fibers can't bend: they can, and some bend-insensitive fibers are designed to be especially resilient. But even bend-insensitive fibers have their limits and there are clearly many applications in which very bendy fibers will come in handy – Keio University's announcement mentions industrial robots and depicts their swiveling limbs as potential applications for plastic fibers.
Prof. Koike will detail the tech at a November conference. ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YU2h07g001OpQYpKI0BzSQAAAMA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://www.keio.ac.jp/ja/press-releases/2021/9/24/28-82658/
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/23/vibration_sensing_optic_fibers_challenge_iot_sensors/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/19/319_terabits_internet_speed/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/ethernet_alliance_technology/
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Why?
I'm pretty sure the Saab 9-3 I used to have had optical fibres to the light cluster controllers at the back. One obvious solution is to have the 12V bussed around to local controllers for whatever and have optical fibres for the CAN bus to control everything. That makes the wiring loom much simpler as variants for different markets and models are a local controller change or even just a different software build.
Re: Why?
Having been a fan of [1]Project Binky for some years now I was amazed at how chaotic the wiring loom could get in a small car.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGSOZAHg1yQHU1tc_3Y5MTQg1qjtxA_nq
Re: Why?
Also, using more plastic in an application such as vehicles that are relatively shortlived is another addition to the list of difficult or impossible to recycle materials that end up in the environment.
The amount of non renewable materials and unnecessary electronics that goes into vehicles now is absurd.
Re: Why?
POF is a big weight-saver compared to copper wire harnesses.
Re: Why?
In case of EMP.
Re: Why?
Not as daft as it sounds. Car engines themselves are a constant source of EMPs. All the electronics in a car need suppression and shielding all over the place. Replacing the signal wiring that acts as an antenna picking all this up with a fibre would help.
However I do wonder how car light bulbs and windows work if glass can't be used in cars.
Re: Why?
why on earth do you need fibre optics in a car
If it's a special fibre optic, that you can buy once in a full moon or it is serialised so it will only work with your car, then it means billions of potential profit for "authorised repair shops". If a mice take a bite of that fragile fibre, there goes your month's salary.
"Critically, the materials are said to have less requirement for forward error correction"
I must be missing something here:
(1) The material surely doesn't need forward error correction, but the data transmission might become more reliable with FEC.
(2) The degradation of information as it is transmitted through a cable (fiber) is distance dependent: Errors accumulate as the path gets longer. Clearly the plastic fibers are meant for short distances, because the optical quality of plastics is usually inferior to that of high quality glass. So I would expect that for a comparable fiber lengths, the polymer fiber would accumulate more errors. Maybe they compared a meter-long polymer fiber to a km-long glass fiber? Or maybe something got lost in translation.
Re: "Critically, the materials are said to have less requirement for forward error correction"
I'm not sure how it would affect error correction in this case, but perhaps the types of errors are different; e.g. due to the different propagation or scattering properties in the different types of fibre. All errors are not necessarily the same.
Re: "Critically, the materials are said to have less requirement for forward error correction"
My rather non-technical understanding about transmission down fibres (and I think this applies to copper as well as optics) is that there are two distance related problems: (i) you lose intensity of the signal so eventually you can't pick it out of the noise; (ii) the signals "smear out" so that a set of nice rectangular pulses going in turns into rolling humps at the other end. These are related to absorption loss and dispersion respectively. My guess is that the Japanese have come up with a plastic fibre that's ok for one of these but not so good for the other, hence the short distance limitation. (It might well say which in the Keio U. announcement but I can't read Japanese!)
Lifetime
I hope that this polymer does not go brittle after 5 years of temperature cycling. Modern cars are potentially very short lived.
Re: Lifetime
Probably the whole point - once the lease ends, you won't be tempted to buy the car and you will get a lease on a new one.
Why?
Other than jumping on the "Connected Car" bandwagon that only Car manufacturers and governments seem to want, why on earth do you need fibre optics in a car?
We've gotten pretty good at car electrics these days.