Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) Basics

What is Plastic Optical Fiber?

Plastic Optical Fiber, (POF), typically uses PMMA (acrylic), a general-purpose resin as the core material, and fluorinated polymers for the cladding material.

In large-diameter fibers, 96 percent of the cross-section is the core that facilitates the transmission of light.

Although quartz fiber is widely used for infrastructures, POF has been called the "consumer" optical fiber. This is due to the fact that costs of POF, associated optical links, connectors and installation costs are low. It is being focused on the following fields in particular:

• Digital home appliance interfaces
• Home networks
• Car networks

Types of Optical Fiber

The material used for POF is typically PMMA. However, there are also many other types of optical fiber. The individual characteristics of these fibers are applied to a variety of fields.