With increasing electronic function and sophistication in automobiles, optical fibers provide an attractive alternative to copper based media. Lower labor and component costs make polymer optical fibers (POF) preferable for this application to fibers based on silica. An analysis of the system budget for star networks which use POF shows that these should perform more than adequately for automotive applications. The implementation of such networks requires branching elements and we describe here the fabrication and evaluation of Y-couplers and star couplers for this purpose.
