Test of Time
By Lisa Greim Everitt, Interactive Week
March 19, 2001
As equipment manufacturers and service providers rush
to build next-generation networks, new approaches to
optical tests and measurement are gaining ground.
Under pressure from carriers, manufacturers need to
quickly move concepts from prototype to mass
production. Carriers have their own set of pressures from
customers eager to deploy complex enhanced services,
with high reliability, at faster speeds, in smaller boxes.
Service providers must be able to verify the performance
of individual components — by bench-testing, then
field-testing variables like chromatic dispersion,
polarization, attenuation and the geometry of the fiber
itself. Finally, the network needs to be monitored, and
troubleshooting must be done as a regular part of its
operation, checking bit-error rates, service levels, fault
isolation, provisioning and power-balancing.
That's a broad range of requirements. What a field tech
needs to do the job on-site is entirely different from what
is needed in the lab, where test instruments the size of
small refrigerators are not uncommon.
"The primary challenge is the speed at which the
measurement needs to be made," says Jennifer Pigg,
who follows optical networking at The Yankee Group in
Boston. In the all-optic network, plugging in electronic
test equipment provides proof of Heisenberg's theorem
— the act of monitoring can degrade the network's
performance.
As dynamic provisioning and other intelligent services
move from pipe dream to reality, analysts say, expect
test functions to migrate from the lab into the network,
integrated into transport equipment.
Lucent Technologies was among the first to explore this
market, teaming with Digital Lightwave, a Clearwater,
Fla., provider of optical network testing gear.
"They realized that in order to speed up deployment,
they need to put the test and diagnostic functions into
the transport equipment," says Digital Lightwave
engineer Doyle Mills. In January, JDS Uniphase took a
minor ity stake in Avantas Networks, a network testing
equipment company based in Montreal.
Last fall, Digital Lightwave added Internet Protocol to the
list of technologies analyzed by its portable Network
Information Computers and Network Access Agents.
Carriers such as 360Networks, Level 3 Communications
and Livingston UK have purchased Digital Lightwave
testers for installation, maintenance and remote
performance monitoring.
Sniffer Technologies, a unit of Network Associates, uses
Digital Lightwave's Dense Wavelength Division
Multiplexing (DWDM) analyzer in its network
management products, allowing technicians to pick out
one circuit from the hundreds within an optical fiber and
run diagnostics on its physical and applications layers.
Among component manufacturers, the name of the
test-and-measurement game is to figure out ways to get
a brilliant idea from prototyping to mass production as
quickly as possible.
Claiming that test and measurement accounts for 60
percent of the cost of optical manufacturing, Canadian
test kit maker Exfo Electro-Optical Engineering is
working on a system that automatically tests DWDM
components, eliminating the need for manual testing.
Exfo, which bought Burleigh Instruments last year for its
fiber-alignment exper tise, has said it will spend $20
million to triple its manufacturing capacity in Vanier,
Quebec.
Another test equipment vendor, Newport, took a similar
tack when it bought Kensington Laboratories in
February. Newport, based in Irvine, Calif., plans to add
Kensington's robotics and motion-control expertise to its
line of test and assembly equipment for semiconductor
and optical device manufacturing. "This is particularly
important as system speed and material handling
features are added to our test and assembly tools," says
Newport Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Deuster.
Plenty of test-and-measurement companies are claiming
"firsts" in the fast-moving market. GN Nettest, a division
of Denmark's GN Great Nordic Group, in January
released a test suite for Multiprotocol Label Switching.
GN Nettest claims its product is "the first complete
MPLS testing solution," covering functional,
conformance, emulation and interoperability testing.
Valiant Networks, in San Jose, says it pioneered a
vendor-neutral approach with its third-party independent
testing lab. Valiant's 6,000-square-foot "UltraNOC"
provides network design, interoperability testing and
other services for service providers and equipment
manufacturers. Anritsu Co. of Richardson, Texas, says it
is the first to support OC-192 (10-gigabit-per-second)
speeds in its testing gear. Luciol Instruments, a Swiss
start-up, says it is the first to develop exquisitely
sensitive photon-counting technology to measure both
glass and polymer optical fiber.
Agilent Technologies says it is the first to focus on
testing the optical control plane — the protocols and
hardware connecting different switches and routers. For
carriers eager to move onto all-optical networks and offer
bandwidth on demand, the control plane holds the key
— but each switch vendor uses its own protocol, from
Sycamore Networks' Broadleaf to Tellium's StarNet to
Ciena's Optical Signal and Routing Protocol. Open
optical networking seems a long way off.
While vendors, carriers and the Optical Internetworking
Forum fight among themselves over standardization,
Agilent's optical control plane analysis software
sidesteps the problem of competing protocols. It
converts and displays everything in hexidecimal code,
carrying new protocols on a small bandwidth-control
channel, rather than taking up a whole wavelength.
While deployment of all-optical networking will be
gradual, Agilent expects plenty of business from optical
equipment developers eagero see how well their
equipment meets market requirements.-
Lisa Greim Everitt is a free-lance writer in Arvada, Colo.
zdnet.com
--
From Forbes Online
THE MEMS MICROCOSM:
Telecommunications
Eric W. Pfeiffer, Forbes ASAP, 04.02.01
REFLECTING THE FUTURE
At the moment, the most important MEMS in the world could well be those
being developed for the all-optical switch, a magical little device that will
make our communications network cheaper and more efficient. In the
past year, 30 new optical-switch companies have emerged, garnering
$1.2 billion in funding, according to consultant Jeff D. Montgomery of
ElectroniCast, an independent consulting firm specializing in optics.
Different types of MEMS are being developed to switch streams of light (or
data) as they travel down fiber-optic cables. Many companies are using
tiny moving mirrors; other companies, such as Agilent Technologies,
believe they can do it by reflecting light off minute bubbles.
Lucent, Nortel Networks, Corning, and JDS
Uniphase are all hard at work, as are
smaller players such as Onix
Microsystems, C Speed, and OMM.
Already this activity has served to greatly
increase the profile of MEMS, and if these
optical switches turn out to be a
commercial success, they will propel the
entire industry forward, according to one of
the pioneers in the MEMS field, Ken Gabriel. The early MEMS were limited
in their range of motion. But the mirrors in these optical switches flip back
and forth, exhibiting a wide sweep of movement. Optical switches, then,
could be an important technical step forward.
Besides switches, MEMS are likely to play a role in other optical-network
components (such arcane things as tunable lasers and variable
attenuators). "There will be great opportunity for those companies
attacking the peripheral components," says analyst Roger Grace (mostly
because the switching space is already overloaded with competing
companies, he adds).
Page 2 of 2 from THE MEMS MICROCOSM: Telecommunications
Eric W. Pfeiffer, Forbes ASAP, 04.02.01
MEMS also are playing a role in another part of the telecommunications
space: radio frequency (RF), which consumers think of as cell phones.
One of the world's leading researchers in this space, Clark Nguyen, an
associate professor at the University of Michigan, is exploring the
possibility of replacing many of the bulky electronic components in cell
phones with MEMS.
Nguyen says venture capitalists are just starting to get interested in this
field, and in the next year we can expect to see a few startups. And no
wonder. This market has the potential to be huge: The United States
currently has 86 million wireless subscribers.
If, as Nguyen believes, 10 to 15 of these RF MEMS could replace
traditional components in the next decade, then cell phones could
become extremely small (the size of a wristwatch), require little in the way
of battery power, and possibly be cheaper. If phones become cheaper and
smaller, then they also become ubiquitous. "This could completely
change the architecture of communication," says Nguyen.
Already, it's rumored that Agilent is gearing up to put one of these MEMS, a
thin-film acoustic resonator, into a cell phone. Lucent and TFR
Technologies in Oregon also are looking into the technology.
It is the growth in optics and RF that Grace sees as a big driver in the
future. In 2000 telecommunications MEMS accounted for $130 million. But
in the next four years, this figure will grow to $3.65 billion, he says,
becoming the third largest moneymaker in the MEMS industry, after the IT
and medical spaces. See MEMS companies. |
