Volume 5, Issue 1

Holes in photonic crystal fibers open new possibilities

Jan. 1, 2003

The idea of the photonic bandgap is opening new possibilities in optical fiber design. Light-guiding in conventional optical fibers depends on total internal reflection at the...

Network Design

Coarse WDM comes of age for local carriers

Jan. 1, 2003

Coarse WDM (CWDM) is a 4, 8, or 16 wavelength-per-fiber technology developed in 2000 and now widely used for metro networking over Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel switching...

Optical Tech

Academically oriented

Jan. 1, 2003

Kristina Johnson is dean of Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering. Previously she was director of the NSF/ERC Optoelectronics Computing Systems Center at the University...

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New Products

Jan. 1, 2003

The Ndrive networked digital drive is available in 10, 20, and 30 A PWM and linear versions. It includes digital and analog I/O, support for square-wave and sine-wave encoders...

Network Design

WDM to the rescue

Jan. 1, 2003

In his 1957 novel Homo Faber, Swiss writer Max Frisch defined technology as "the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." It's a challenging observation...

More content from Volume 5, Issue 1

Transport

Passively aligned integrated regenerator offers low coupling loss

Jan. 1, 2003

At ECOC 2002 (Copenhagen, Denmark), Graeme Maxwell and others at Corning Research Centre (Martlesham Heath, Ipswich, England) reported integrating a low-coupling-loss all-optical...

Components

64-channel selector beats scaling problem

Jan. 1, 2003

Integration of WDM channel selectors should be significantly simpler now that it an optical gate isn't needed for each channel. A new two-stage device in development at NTT Photonics...

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VCSELs emit 10 Gbit/s at 1.55 μm

Jan. 1, 2003

A 1.55 mm vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) that can supply high bit rates for the metro market was reported in a postdeadline paper at ECOC 2002 (Copenhagen, Denmark...

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WDM provides targeted services in CATV networks

Jan. 1, 2003

Community antenna television (CATV or cable TV) networks were developed several decades ago to deliver a few channels of analog television to a fraction of the homes in a small...

PON/Systems

PON performance improves with multiplexing

Jan. 1, 2003

While core and metro optical networks are the linchpin of the global telecommunications infrastructure, the architecture of the optical access network is still in development....

Electronics

Jitter control is critical to transponder performance

Jan. 1, 2003

Jitter control in serializer/deserializer (SERDES) design is essential to the performance of optical transponder modules for communications applications. The three performance...