OMM says optical cross-connects are shipping
Sat Apr 01 00:57:00 EST 2000
Mar. 31, 2000 (Electronic Engineering Times - CMP via COMTEX) -- SAN MATEO, CALIF. - Spurred by the recent publicity surrounding Xros Inc., Optical Micro Machines Inc. (OMM) has announced that its small-scale cross-connects are
already shipping and that a part larger than the Xros 1,152-port cross-connect is in the works.
OMM officials won't speculate on whether their part will be released ahead of Xros' X-1000, but they do pledge to have a prototype working by the end of the year. Meanwhile, OMM's customers are finding ways to combine the smaller switches-cross-connects of 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 size-into makeshift switch fabrics of 1,000 or more ports, said Conrad Burke, senior vice president of marketing.
It's difficult to make meaningful comparisons between OMM and Xros because the companies are taking different business approaches, Burke said. OMM is selling subsystems to telecom equipment suppliers, while Xros hopes to sell directly to
network operators and carriers.
Both are competing to provide optical switching technology based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), using tiny mirrors to bounce light to the proper ports. When Xros (Sunnyvale, Calif.) accepted an acquisition bid from
Nortel Networks for a cool $3.25 billion just after announcing its presence, OMM (San Diego) appeared to have been left behind. But while Xros is going for the kill with its 1,152-port cross-connect, OMM is taking its time building smaller parts.
"We had a parallel program which was going along anyway for very large optical cross-connects," Burke said.
A thousand ports
"They [Xros] have taken what they've done in the lab and extrapolated that they can make a product out of it," said Marc Fernandez, OMM's director of marketing. "If OMM had been tasked with showing a 1,000-port switch in the lab, we could have done that six months ago."
The differences among networks complicate Xros' approach, said Fernandez. Integration into each new vendor's networking platform would have to be considered separately, which might have been a motivation for Xros to join
forces permanently with Nortel, he said.
OMM is developing a large-scale MEMS technology that allows 3-D rotation of mirrors to virtually any position. But the company also has been producing smaller parts based on a 2-D MEMS setup. That approach requires far more than one mirror per port-a 4 x 4 cross-connect needs 16 mirrors-and the mirrors have only two possible positions each: "on" and "off."
Another factor is that the 3-D parts are significantly harder to make, he said. "A 3-D approach, although the MEMS is very similar to the 2-D approach, has a lot of servo drive electronics around it."
Still, the company hopes to have the 3-D technology and a cross-switch exceeding 1,000 ports prototyped by year's end. No details are out yet, but Burke said the larger cross-connects are built on a modular scheme, based in part on proprietary packaging technology, so that the failure of a single mirror won't ruin the entire box.
"If you have really good packaging, there are ways to get around replacing a whole system," Fernandez said.
More immediately, OMM has been shipping 4 x 4 and 8 x 8 cross-connects and is completing work on a 16 x 16 part. A 32 x 32 cross-connect should be available by year's end, Burke said.
The company also has announced live trials of its parts, such as those handling 10 Gbit/second traffic, in an unmanned office in Oakland, Calif. Meanwhile, some
customers are finding novel ways to develop large all-optical switches out of OMM's smaller parts, Burke said, noting that thousand-port switches can be built of multiple 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 parts. Burke declined to provide details.
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