Holiday Update:
Fiber Optic Center will be closed December 24 and 25.
Due to potential early carrier pickups, PLEASE HAVE ALL ORDERS IN BY NOON ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 23.


We will resume our regular business hours on Thursday, December 26.

Fiber Optic Center will be at Photonics West - Schedule your meeting with a member of the FOC team now

Fiber Process Development and Manufacturing - Blog Articles

Optical Fiber Coatings Explained

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...
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Polarization-Maintaining Fibers Explained

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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Optical Fiber Draw Towers: Procedures for Drawing Specialty Fibers

Procedures For Drawing Specialty Fibers

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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Specialty Fiber Explained

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...
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Fabricating Doped Fiber Preforms

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...
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Thulium-Doped Fibers

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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Rare Earth Doped Fibers

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...
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MCVD Tips: 14 Ideas to Enhance Preform Strength, Yield, and Reproducibility

"Trial and error." These two words sum up my 24 years developing and manufacturing specialty preforms and fibers where I operated an MCVD gas delivery system. Our team was constantly testing new ideas to improve fiber strength and yield as well as the...
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MCVD Options: These Add-on Features Can Enhance Your Optical Fiber Preform Strength, Yield, and Reproducibility

You can manufacture optical fiber preforms with a very basic system, essentially a gas delivery system in a room with an MCVD lathe. Or you can enhance your system by adding many accessories that will improve fiber strength and yield as well as the ...
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Controlling the Optical Fiber Preform Deposition Process

Ensure the gas deposition stream is tightly controlled Prior to starting deposition, a key activity is ensuring the rotary seal is leak tight to prevent issues with fiber quality. In a previous article (“Comparing the 2 types of MCVD gas delivery systems”), ...
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