Universal fibers for data center applications

In this paper, we present a new type of optical fiber, called universal fiber, which can be used for both multimode and single mode transmissions. The fiber is a multimode fiber that has an LP01 mode field diameter approximately matched to that of standard single mode fiber. First, we will present the universal fiber design concept and discuss design tradeoffs for both single mode and multimode operations. Then we will show characterizations of a preliminary experimental fiber and present system testing results with 110 m, 150 m and 2700 m system reach using 100G SR4, 40G sWDM multimode and 100G CWDM4 single mode transceivers, respectively, which demonstrate both multimode and single mode transmission capabilities of universal fiber.