Feb 12 2008
NeoPhotonics today announced the release of fully athermal and fully passive Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) MUX/DMUX modules with a 50 GHz channel spacing. These devices have up to 44 channels and incorporate the same, patented stabilization and Photonic Integration Circuit (PIC) technology as the company’s extensive line of 100GHz channel spacing athermal AWGs, which have been shipping in volume to customers around the world since 2004.
Compared to other 100 or 50 GHz AWG products, the NeoPhotonics® 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 company 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 exposition in San Diego, CA, February 26-28.
“The addition of 50 GHz athermal AWGs to our existing product line allows us to serve many different network applications,” stated Ferris Lipscomb, VP 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. With the addition of 50GHz 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,” emphasized Tim Jenks, CEO of NeoPhotonics. “Many wavelength selective switch (WSS) reconfiguration nodes require MUX and DMUX for locally terminated add and drop traffic. This function is efficiently carried out by an unpowered shelf containing two AWGs for MUX and DMUX with a connector panel. 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/DMUX shelves to be increasingly deployed as reconfiguration functions move farther out toward the edge of the network.”