Hello Leon, I found your observation and question interesting. Perhaps, for some not-so-obvious reasons, however:
"...plastic optical fiber to me means that their chip technology is only applicable to a LAN environment and is not in the more lucrative (i.e. glass optical fiber) space as JDSU etc... Is this still correct?"
I don't know if your initial read on the intended purposes behind POF, or POF's releationship to the DWDM aspect of their work, was accurate. In any event, one of the salient points about the future benefits of chip-based optics [which may not yet be very obvious], is that they will act as enabling elements in bringing multi-lane optical networking "within" in-buildings riser assemblies, campus distribution, individual workgroups, LANs in general, right down to the end point expansion boards. Possibly even embedded at some point in the future onto motherboards. Not right now, of course, but several years down the road.
Plastic fiber experimentation and the actual deployments of same, however, have never met with much success in the past for a variety of reasons except for some niche applications. A company that put a lot of weight into this back in the Eitghties was Codenoll Technology Corp. (which has since been acquired by ADC Corp), and despite the heavy emphasis they placed on it, it never materialized to much in the spaces they targeted, i.e., namely, in LANs.
As for their intended uses of POF, however, I cannot speak to any progress that LUMM has had in this regard specifically, but I can say that POF to the best of my knowledge has never been a friendly component of DWDM assemblies... indeed, it may very well be (and probably still is to a great extent) just the opposite for most of the conventional distances and wavelengths used today. FWIW.
Perhaps someone else who is more familiar with LUMM's motivation behind their POF work can add to this.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
