Applications optical communication devices

Polymers that have been already found to offer NLO behavior include polydiacetylenes and a number of polymers with liquid crystal side chains. Polymers are also employed as carriers of materials, which themselves are NLO materials. Applications include communication devices, routing components, and optical switches. 

The chalcogenides of Be, Zn, Cd, and Hg are often referred to as II-VI semiconductors. They all have a zinc blende-type structure. The band gap decreases with increasing size of the metal from 3.0 eV in beryllium to 0.02 eV in mercury. The II-VI semiconductors find applications in solar cells, IR detectors, and optical communication devices. 

Light wave technologies provide a number of special challenges for polymeric materials. Polymer fibers offer the best potential for optical communications in local area network (LAN) applications, because their large core size makes it relatively cheap to attach connectors to them. There is a need for polymer fibers that have low losses and that can transmit the bandwidths needed for LAN applications the aciylate and methacrylate polymers now under study have poor loss and bandwidth performance. Research on monomer purification, polymerization to precise molecular-size distributions, and weU-controlled drawing processes is relevant here. There is also a need for precision plastic molding processes for mass prodnction of optical fiber connectors and splice hardware. A tenfold reduction in the cost of fiber and related devices is necessaiy to make the utilization of optical fiber and related devices economical for local area networks and tlie telecommunications loop. 

Arrayed microlenses are widely used in a variety of applications that involve miniaturized optical components.172 For example, they can be found at the heart of optical communication systems, facsimile machines, laser printers, and many other kinds of digital information storage or processing devices. In all these applications, the arrayed microlenses simply serve as diode laser correctors, fiber-optic couplers or connectors, and optical scanners. In a set of recent publications, Whitesides and coworkers have also demonstrated that arrayed microlenses could be used as a new platform for photolithography, through which submicrometer-sized structures could be conveniently fabricated as patterned arrays by reducing mm to cm scale features on a photomask.157... 

Traditional ceramics are quite common, from sanitary ware to fine chinas and porcelains to glass products. Currently ceramics are being considered for uses that a few decades ago were inconceivable applications ranging from ceramic engines to optical communications, electrooptic applications to laser materials, and substrates in electronic circuits to electrodes in photoelectrochemical devices. Some of the recent applications for which ceramics are used and/or are prime candidates are listed in Table 1.1. 

The major applications of lasers are CD players, optical storage devices including CD-ROM (optical read-only memory), WORM (write once, read many times) and true optical disks (unlimited read and write). The amount of information that can be packed on a disk presently is limited to the size of the spot generated by the laser. The shorter the wavelength, the smaller the spot. Other applications include laser printers, spectroscopy, and communications. Lasers operating at 1.3 micrometers and 1.55 micrometers are used for low loss quartz fiber optic communications. AlGaAs is used for... 

In this chapter, we discuss the characteristics of OLEDs fabricated by vacuum and solution process and their application in optical communication. We also discuss the characteristics of OPDs fabricated by vacuum and by solution process. The mechanism of device performance and the application to optical communication is also discussed. 

Despite the investigation of RGB OLEDs for display applications, Ir complexes have also been used to exploit near-infi ared (NIR) OLEDs for optical communication and biomedical application. Jabbour et al. demonstrated the first example of NIR OLEDs fabricated by the cyclometalated Ir complex NIRl (53, Fig. 24) by increasing the size of the cyclometalated ligand 7t system [98]. The devices exhibited exclusive emission with a peak value at 720 nm, and the external quantum efficiency was nearly 0.1%. 

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