NeoPhotonics touts 50-GHz AWG

FEBRUARY 11, 2008 -- NeoPhotonics (search for NeoPhotonics) today announced the release of fully athermal and fully passive Arrayed Waveguide Grating (search for AWG) mux/demux modules with a 50-GHz channel spacing. The company says these devices have up to 44 channels and incorporate the same, patented stabilization and Photonic Integration Circuit (PIC) technology as its line of 100-GHz channel spacing athermal AWGs, which have been shipping in volume to customers worldwide since 2004.
 
Compared to other 100- or 50-GHz AWG products, the NeoPhotonics says its 50-GHz athermal AWG exhibits increased thermal stability, improved ITU-grid accuracy and a wider relative pass-band, allowing use in high-end metro and long-haul DWDM fiber optic transmission systems.
 
"The addition of 50-GHz athermal AWGs to our existing product line allows us to serve many different network applications," explains Ferris Lipscomb, vice president of marketing at NeoPhotonics. "We now incorporate our athermal AWGs into rack-mounted shelves suitable for direct installation in customer systems. Since many of these shelves are unpowered, athermal AWGs are necessary to bring the benefits of photonic integration to these systems," he notes. "With the addition of 50-GHz channel spacing, we expect athermal AWGs to continue to displace thin film filters in many systems used for core and edge network wavelength-based switching and transport services."
 
"We are finding increasing applications of athermal AWGs in reconfigurable optical networks," adds Tim Jenks, CEO of NeoPhotonics. "Many wavelength selective switch [search for WSS] reconfiguration nodes require mux and demux for locally terminated add and drop traffic. This function is efficiently carried out by an unpowered shelf containing two AWGs for mux and demux with a connector panel," he reports. "The fact that the shelf is completely passive delivers greatly reduced system costs, while providing the high optical performance necessary for reconfigurable systems. We expect these athermal mux/demux shelves to be increasingly deployed as reconfiguration functions move farther out toward the edge of the network."

NeoPhotonics intends to display samples of the 50-GHz AWG and other products, such as the NTL2000 widely tunable laser, at Booth 2339 during the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) exposition in San Diego, CA, from February 26-28, 2008.

 
Visit NeoPhotonics