NEC has published a technical paper on its development of an optical switching device capable of changing between a variety of transmission paths (routes) using silicon photonic technologies (optical circuits using silicon-based semiconductors) with ultra high capacity 20Tbps optical signals. NEC said its prototype device has demonstrated high quality optical switching, without signal deterioration, of optical super channels (20Tbps) and 100 Gbps DP-QPSK.
NEC describes its device as a transponder aggregator (TPA) that supports multiple signal formats and features a color-less, direction-less, contention-less (CDC) Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) capabilities.
“NEC’s new developments utilize TPA and produce compact modules featuring silicon integrated optical switches that boast 150 elements on a single chip. This enables the switching of large 48-unit transponders between 8 routes while capitalizing on CDC functions,” said Naoki Nishi, General Manager, Green Platform Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation. “We now anticipate the incorporation of this TPA on a single board as well as the reduction of module size and power consumption by roughly 90% when compared to optical switches based on conventional silica optical waveguides. Furthermore, the optimized drive of each switch will enable us to provide high speed, stable signal switching.”
NEC is presenting its research at this week’s Photonics in Switching 2012 (PS 2012) conference in Corsica, France, and at ECOC 2012 in Amsterdam, Holland.
