Reflective single-mode fiber-optic passive star couplers

Abstract

Architecture arrangements for constructing reflective single-mode fiber-optic passive star couplers for high-speed optical local-area networks using simple components, e.g. 3-dB couplers and mirrors, are presented. Besides the savings of fibers, the number of components needed to construct a reflective star is shown to be half of that needed for an equivalent transmissive star. To avoid unpredictable interference effects, only structures that are free of multipaths are considered.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>