Investigation of Optical Couplers for the Application in Optical Bus Systems for Autonomous Cars

Investigation of Optical Couplers for the Application in Optical Bus Systems for Autonomous Cars

With more and more infotainment facilities and driving assistance systems in cars, there rises the demand of a large bandwidth of data communication and a low-cost data network for the communications. Optical data bus is a good solution to meet these requirements. In terms of the waveguides that could be used in this data bus system, polymer optical waveguides are considered to be more suitable than other options such as silicon optical fibres and polymer optical fibres (POF) since they are flexible and can be printed and easily laminated with existing circuits. However, in order to achieve a complete optical system, having only polymer waveguides is not enough. Compatible optical couplers are essential to get the information into and out of the waveguides. Their performance will affect the power efficiency and the signal quality of the whole bus system.

The aim of this  project is to investigate the proper design of optical couplers for the use in polymer optical data bus systems for autonomous cars.To be more specific, a coupler that can pick up a specific mode from the multimode bus waveguide will be considered, which would be useful in a mode division multiplexing system. Secondly, investigation will be carried out on making the coupling ratio of the coupler tunable. Thirdly, input coupler that can couple a specific mode into the bus system will be worked on since there may be different requirements between the design of an output coupler and an input coupler.

You can read more here: GtR