Craig,
It is definitely true that DWDM technology play an important role on long-haul
transmission and its market share will expand quickly and more quickly. However, is
lightpath involved in this market yet?
LPTHA stirred quite a bit interest in CLEO this year. My colleage attended this
conference and went back to report this interesting device. We start to look into it to
see if it can be used to do some wavelength controlling components such as
wavelength locker, demultiplexers, etc..) However, after talked to the designer on
WDM in this company, it is still far away to be a candidate of WDM product. If you
are a DWDM component designer, just ask yourself. Have they demonstrated any
working devices? Do they know what's miminum spacing they can separate ( 200GHz,
100GHz, or lower??)? Since this is a bulk optic device, do they know how to or even
if it can couple the light from fiber into GRADIUM and couple light back to fiber?
What's the insertion loss, isolation ( crosstalk???), etc...? Anybody can claim that a
prism can separate the light. ( not tell you that it can't do 1.6nm channel spacing)They
don't have experimental data. If you find out all these answers, you will be amazed to
find the words used in all their statements ( might , may, ). Nothing is demonstrated
yet!!!!
IMHO, be very careful.
CJ |
