Richard Tumminelli, AFO consulting for Fiber Optic Center, Inc. (FOC), began his career at FOC in 2020 as Fiber Design and Manufacturing Consultant, Rare Earth Doped Optical Fiber Expert.
Rick recently retired from the position of Director of Engineering at the Coherent fiber site in Salem, NH, and has been working in the field of rare earth doped optical fiber for 40 years. Prior to this position, he managed the specialty fiber group at JDS Uniphase, specializing in double clad fibers for fiber lasers and erbium doped fiber. Richard also held positions in the optics group at Draper Laboratories, and was a member of the Polaroid fiber optic team under the direction of Dr. Elias Snitzer, which did much of the seminal work in rare earth doped fibers, fiber lasers and amplifiers.
He is a co-inventor of double clad fiber laser pumping, has been granted 22 patents and has 20 publications in fiber lasers and amplifiers.
This article continues FOC’s latest series on optical fiber manufacturing processes, providing an overview of coatings for a wide range of standard communication and specialty optical fibers. The main job of coatings is to protect the glass fiber, but there...
In this article, the latest in FOC’s series covering specialty fibers and their fabrication, we discuss polarization-maintaining (PM) fibers and the various approaches used to make them. There are several PM fiber designs – all quite different and each with it
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Objectives of the fiber drawing process -
The draw process takes a specialty fiber preform that may measure one meter in length and stretches it into hundreds of meters or even multiple kilometers of fiber. The preform is designed and fabricated with dopants and
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Since 2018, FOC has provided more than 10 articles on making fiber and preforms. One series of seven articles, launched in January 2018 and written by Larry Donalds, focuses on MCVD technology and issues in making preforms. The second series, started in July...
Every step requires precision, starting with the core rod. This is the third in FOC’s new series on doped fiber technology. The first article, "Rare Earth Doped Fibers," reviewed the main methods for making doped-fiber preforms. The second article, "Thulium...
This new series of articles from FOC will focus on the production of rare earth-doped fiber. The first article in this series, Rare Earth Doped Fibers, discussed the evolution of the main processes for making doped fiber preforms. This article discusses
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Believe it or not, rare earth doped optical fiber has been around for about 60 years. Eli Snitzer was the first to report on laser action in a neodymium-doped silicate glass fiber emitting at 1.06 µm back in 1961. This was the first demonstration of laser...
