SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Silicon Light Machines, a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor Corp., is taking its diffractive-MEMS technology from its gain-equalizer roots to a new blocking filter application. The company will introduce its Reconfigurable Blocking Filter at this week's ECOC conference in Europe, and at next week's National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference in Dallas.
The Silicon Light Machines technology is based on a Stanford University technology in which a series of silicon nitride ribbons is positioned above a silicon substrate. In the original products, controlled light diffraction was used as a means of equalizing gain across multiple wave-division-multiplexed channels.
Channels selectively blocked
In the new 4 x 6 x 1-inch module introduced by SLM, any channel can be selectively blocked in reconfigurable optical add-drop mux equipment in either the C or L bands, using either 50-GHz or 100-GHz spacing. Wavelengths need not be blocked in any special channel groups, but can be individually controlled. Vice president of marketing Hal Zarem said that "this gives the ROADM system the flexibility to be used in any ring-to-ring interconnect, or in optical meshes."
In theory, the size of the RBM module would allow ROADM systems to be implemented in 1U or 3U "pizza box" packages. The interface for switch management is easy to use, and similar in many respects to the power-management interface for the 2200 dynamic gain equalizer introduced earlier this year.
While details on pricing will not be announced until modules ship in the fourth quarter, Zarem said that "they will be very competitive on a cost-per-wavelength basis."
