What is an optical splitter?
The planar lightwave circuit (PLC) optical splitter is a passive optical element based on optical semiconductor technology. This element allows for waveguide and power distribution, where an incident light beam can be split into two or more light beams, and vice versa.
Below is a diagram of the optical splitter:
What does an optical splitter look like?
The optical splitter is used to split one or two optical signals into multiple optical signals, in order to achieve efficient data transmission.
As mentioned above, the PLC optical splitter plays a fundamental role in passive optical networks (PONs), as this device allows an incident light beam to be split/separated into several light beams, and also divides the power uniformly. The most common input/output configurations are:
- 1xN (N=2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64)
- 2xN (N=2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64)1.
The following table shows the insertion losses, depending on the configuration of the PLC optical splitter.
The following illustration shows the basic structure of a 1x4 optical splitter, where a light beam is split into four, and the power is uniformly divided among the four outputs of the PLC optical splitter.
1 Note: The insertion loss is the same for both splitter types (1 x N and 2 x N), but the output result with respect to the input of the OTDR tests is different: the loss for 2 x N is 1.5 dB lower than the loss shown in the table.
At Incom, you can find different splitters for your project. If you need more advice, you can contact our technical support or purchase your products directly from a sales representative.
