ROCKY MOUNTAIN SECTION OPTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
                              &
           IEEE LASERS AND ELECTROOPTICS SOCIETY


                        Nov. Meeting

Date:  Thursday, 18 Nov. 1999
Time:  7:00 PM refreshments, 7:30 PM talk
Place: National Institute of Standards and Technology
       325 Broadway, Boulder, CO
       Auditorium


Title: Characterizing Multimode Fiber for Gigabit Network
       Applications

       John Schlager
       NIST


Abstract:

To satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for information 
delivery to the end user, bit rates previously reserved for 
the telecommunications market such as 1 gigabit per second 
(Gbps) and 10 Gbps are now being considered for low-cost 
local area networks. A solution the market is currently 
considering is the combination of low cost, short wavelength 
transceivers (e.g. Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers, 
VCSELs) and multimode fiber.  This is an ideal marriage since 
standard single-mode fiber is not designed to operate at 
short wavelengths such as 850 nm where VCSEL technology is 
currently tuned, and low cost manufacturing processes 
combined with market dynamics are driving down the cost for 
VCSELs and multimode fiber systems.  Also, preliminary 
estimates suggest that 62.5 micron multimode fiber can 
achieve a two-times improvement in standard estimates of 
system bit rate, and 50 micron fiber can be tuned to achieve 
10 Gbps operation at standard two to three hundred meter link 
lengths. The bandwidth performance of laser-based multimode-
fiber gigabit networks depends on both transceiver and fiber 
properties.  Reproducible and simple methods for measuring 
these properties are needed to improve gigabit network 
performance, and these are currently being developed by the 
Telecommunications Industry Association FO-2.2 Working Group 
on the Modal Dependence of Bandwidth. The talk will review 
the ongoing efforts to characterize the multimode fibers and 
transceivers for high-speed network applications. 


Biography:

John Schlager received the B.A. degree in physics and 
mathematics from Lawrence University, Appleton, WI, in 1985 
and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University 
of Colorado, Boulder, CO, in 1987 and 1992, respectively.  He 
has been a member of the Optoelectronics Division at N.I.S.T. 
since May 1987 where he has been researching mode-locked 
fiber lasers, soliton pulse shaping in optical fiber, optical 
sampling measurements, fiber nonlinearities, and multimode 
fiber characterization.  John spent nine months ('90-'91) at 
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Japan working as a 
guest scientist on mode-locked fiber lasers for the High-
Speed Optical Transmission Research Group.  He is currently 
working with the Telecommunications Industry Association 
(TIA) on technical standards for multimode-fiber networks 
operating at gigabit-per-second data rates and above. John 
Schlager is a member of the Optical Society of America, the 
IEEE, and Phi Beta Kappa.