Tag: Reflectance

Rise of the splice machines

With the move to higher and higher bandwidth, there is an industry emphasis on the insertion loss and reflectance performance of optical fiber terminations. While there are still optical fiber termination methods that rely on field polish of the optical fiber at the point of installation, the dominant technology today is the polish of optical fiber connectors in the controlled manufacturing environment. Even connectors that are field installable often have their fiber endface prepared in the controlled and repeatable environment of the factory

Short-Reach Singlemode Puts Reflectance on the Radar

Insertion loss budgets have gotten tighter as we have moved from 10 to 40/100 Gig for multimode fiber applications. One would think that we can’t say the same for singlemode applications that have historically meant larger loss budgets – 6.3 dB for 100 Gig over singlemode (100GBASE-LR4) versus just 1.9 dB for 100 Gig over multimode (100GBASE-SR4). But that’s no longer the case with new short-reach singlemode applications. And it’s not just insertion loss that matters with these applications; you now need to also be concerned with reflection.