General Photonics offers TCA-1000 SmartLight Tunable ASE Source for 40G signal emulation

General Photonics has announced general availability for its TCA-1000 SmartLight tunable amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) source with 50-GHz channel spacing on the ITU grid. The fully polarized light source features a FWHM bandwidth of 0.3 nm. The TCA-1000 SmartLight is designed to emulate a 40-Gbps signal for polarization mode dispersion (PMD) effect tests, in-service link PMD measurement, PMD compensator evaluation, WDM channel testing, 40G system testing, and 40G optical component testing.

The TCA-1000 features a built-in polarization rotator allowing its use in conjunction with General Photonics’ PMDPro PMD-1000 polarization optimized PMD source to monitor or measure the PMD of an in-service WDM channel. It can also be used to evaluate the performance of PMD compensators with DOP feedback. Other applications include measuring spectrum-averaged values of parameters such as the insertion loss (IL), polarization dependent loss (PDL), and return loss (RL) of a fiber component on a 40-Gbps signal for each WDM channel. The TCA-1000's polarization rotator rotates the output polarization by 45 degrees with a speed of 0.2 ms.

"It's no secret that PMD can have undesirable performance impacts on fiber-optic data transmission links exceeding 10 Gbps," said Steve Yao, president of General Photonics. "One of the major applications of the TCA-1000 is to aid our PMDPro to accurately measure the PMD values of in-service optical light paths with 50-GHz spacing. Measurement on in-service links delivers advanced performance insight into service provider networks."

The TCA-1000 operates in the C-Band. The wavelength channel can be tuned either via the front panel keypad or via the communication ports on the rear panel. Tuning speed is less than 10 s, the company asserts. Standard communication interfaces include RS-232, USB, Ethernet, and GPIB. Maximum power output is 16 dBm and the power attenuation range is 20 dB. The output power level can be controlled via an internal VOA. Short-term power stability is 0.004 dB over 1 minute and long term power stability is 0.05 dB for more than 8 hours.

Visit General Photonics