General Photonics Introduces TCA-1000 SmartLight Polarized Light Source

General Photonics has declared that the TCA-1000 SmartLight is now available in the market.

The tunable ASE source with a channel spacing of 50 GHz on the ITU grid can be used to generate an optical signal of 40 Gb/s to carry out PMD tests; to evaluate PMD compensator and to measure the PMD of an in-service link. This complete polarized light source can be utilized for testing 40 G component, 40 G system and WDM channel.

The polarization rotator in the TCA-1000 spins the output polarization at a speed of 0.2 ms and by an angle of 45°. The in-built polarization rotator enables users to pair the device with the PMDPro Polarization Optimized PMD Source from General Photonics to carry out the PMD measurements.

The TCA-1000 can also be used to assess the PMD compensator performance with DOP feedback. This light source can be used to calculate spectrum-averaged values of parameters, including the return loss (RL), polarization dependent loss (PDL) and insertion loss (IL) of an optical fiber component on a 40 Gb/s signal.