Electrooptic multiplexer system for multimode fiber communications

The concept of internal reflectance at grazing incidence has been used to construct functional 4:1 electrooptic multiplexers for multimode single-fiber optical data communication. Individual multiplexer units having insertion losses as low as 10 dB and optical signal-to-crosstalk ratios as high as 15 dB have been fabricated. A complete time division multiplexed optical data link has been assembled using two 4:1 multiplexers. The operation of this link demonstrates the feasibility of optically multiplexing multimode signals and represents a benchmark in the progress to control and route multimode light energy.