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PTB Industry News |
April 26 , 1999 | ||||||
Astarte Fiber Networks Demonstrates | |||||||
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BOULDER, CO, Apr. 7 -- Texas Instruments (TI) and Astarte Fiber Networks, Inc. have announced a product-development milestone in the field of Optical Cross-Connect (OXC) technology. According to the two firms, a newly developed optical technology has enabled researchers to demonstrate an optical-switching capability that is applicable to OXC's with hundreds of fiber ports. It is also readily scalable to accommodate switches with thousands of ports. TI developed the switch-actuating mechanism as an outgrowth of its experience in producing Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) microchips, which are a key component in the company's Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology for projection display and hardcopy applications. According to TI, the switch-actuating mechanism includes silicon micromirrors based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The mirrors are hermetically packaged and are controlled electromagnetically. They are designed to provide the fast switching speed, low optical loss, and high reliability required in optical networks. TI says that the mirror was tested for hundreds of millions of switching operations. Astarte's OXC technology is modular, with each module containing transmit and receive fibers ports along with associated optical and electronic components. The company says that each module is hot-swappable and the OXC may be populated with any number of modules up to its full capacity. This allows in-service expansion of the switch and module level repair by the user's technicians. According to Astarte, optical connectivity through the OXC is strictly non-blocking: Any pair of input and output fibers can be connected, and all connections may co-exist at any time. When received by the OXC, connection commands are downloaded to individual modules via redundant system processors. Each module is then autonomous in performing the connection. The company says that establishment or termination of any optical connection has no effect on other connections within the OXC, which is designed to fully reconfigure and implement a new connection table in less than 10 milliseconds. The OXC technology demonstrated operates with singlemode fibers. Astarte says that the OXC is transparent to optical signals in the range of 1250 nm to 1650 nm, permitting use of this optical-switch technology in networks utilizing dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology. Insertion loss (input fiber to output fiber) is specified at less than 6 dB over the entire transmission window. Because the OXC is not sensitive to the data range of the optical signal, carriers will be able to upgrade fiber networks without changing the OXC. Polarization dependent loss is less than 0.5 dB; wavelength dispersion is not measurable. According to Astarte, measurements on the demonstration platform at the firm's Boulder, CO, headquarters have confirmed these specifications. PTB Home |