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Technology Stocks : Texas Instruments - Good buy now or should we wait? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (4375)	4/8/1999 7:52:00 PM
From: Patriarch	Respond to of 6180

Astarte Fiber Networks, Inc. Announces Optical Network Breakthrough April 7, 1999 04:39 PM BOULDER, Colo., April 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) and Astarte Fiber Networks, Inc. today announced a major product development milestone in the field of Optical Cross-Connect (OXC) technology. Utilizing newly-developed optical technology the two firms have demonstrated an optical switching capability that is applicable to OXC's with hundreds of fiber ports and can readily scale to enable switches with thousands of fiber ports. This OXC functionality is essential in the evolution of all-optical networks within the telecommunications industry and the Internet. TI developed the switch actuating mechanism as an outgrowth of its experience in producing Digital Micromirror Device (DMD(TM)) microchips. The DMD(TM) microchip is a key component in TI's Digital Light Processing (DLP(TM)) technology for projection display and hardcopy applications. The switch actuating mechanism includes silicon micromirrors based on microelectomechanical systems (MEMS) technology. These mirrors are hermetically packaged and are controlled by electromagnetic means. They are designed to provide the fast switching speed, low optical loss, and high reliability required in optical networks. The mirror was tested for hundreds of millions of switching operations. Astarte's OXC technology is modular, with each module containing transmit and receive fibers ports and associated optical and electronic components. Each module is hot-swappable and the OXC may be populated with any number of modules up to its full capacity. This allows in-service expansion of the switch, and module level repair by the user's technicians. Optical connectivity through the OXC is strictly non-blocking. Any pair of input and output fibers can be connected and all connections may co-exist at any time. Connection commands received by the OXC are downloaded to the individual modules by redundant system processors. Each module is then autonomous in performing the commanded connection. Switch connection commands are executed concurrently by the modules. Establishment or termination of any optical connection has no effect on existing connections within the OXC. The OXC can fully reconfigure and implement a new connection table in less than 10 milliseconds. The OXC technology demonstrated operates with singlemode fibers. The OXC is transparent to optical signals in the range of 1250 nanometers (nm) to 1650 nm, permitting use of this optical switch technology in networks utilizing dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology. Insertion loss (input fiber to output fiber) is specified at less than 6 dB over the entire transmission window. The OXC is not sensitive to the data rate of the optical signal allowing carriers to upgrade their fiber networks without changes to the OXC. Polarization dependent loss is less then 0.5 dB. Wavelength dispersion is not measurable. Measurements on the demonstration platform at Astarte's Boulder headquarters have confirmed these specifications. Since Astarte's OXC employs a single stage of switching, the technology demonstrated allows low loss, even for optical switches with very large port counts. Many other technologies being investigated today require multiple switch stages to achieve larger port counts. These technologies typically can only be used for switches up to 16x16 before losses become too great; larger switches can be built from these smaller blocks, but amplification and interconnection difficulties make these technologies impractical today. NOTE TO EDITORS: Texas Instruments Incorporated is a global semiconductor company and the world's leading designer and supplier of digital signal processing and analog technologies, the engines driving the digitization of electronics. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, the company's businesses also include Materials and Controls, Educational and Productivity Solutions and Digital Imaging. The company has manufacturing or sales operations in more than 25 countries. Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TXN. More information is located on the World Wide Web at ti.com Contact Person: David Krozier (MEMS technology) (508) 236-2117, dkrozier@ti.com Texas Instruments 34 Forest Street, MS 10-14 P.O. Box 2964 Attleboro, MA 02703-0964 Astarte Fiber Networks, Incorporated is a privately held firm located in Boulder, CO and is the world's leading producer of Optical Cross-Connect switches. Current Astarte products include the StarSwitch 7200 Optical Cross-connect System. The 7200 has up to 72x72 connections, making it the largest non-blocking Optical Cross-Connect switch available today. This product has been deployed in MCI WorldCom's optical backbone for the last two and a half years as part of their optical restoration architecture. The products are also deployed in numerous mission critical networks in the Federal Government, aerospace, financial, and other industries. More information is located on the World Wide Web at starswitch.com Contact person: Ed Fontenot, (OXC technology)(303)443-8778, Ed.Fontenot@starswitch.com Astarte Fiber Networks, Inc. 2555 55th Street, Suite 200 Boulder, CO 80301 SOURCE Astarte Fiber Networks, Inc.