Optoplex Corporation, a pioneer in the development of tunable filters, announced today that it will be demonstrating its optical performance monitor at Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) Exhibition to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, March 25-28, 2003.

Leveraging on its proprietary tunable filter platform, the current generation device automatically scans the C- or L-band wavelength range and provides channel power, wavelength and OSNR data in less than 30 ms. The OPM product family can support 100-, 50- and 25-GHz channel spacing and comes in a space-efficient 2 inch by 5 inch module.

With increasing optical network complexity, performance monitoring, power management and signal conditioning are more important than ever. To effectively perform these tasks at various nodes, cost-effective optical performance monitoring is crucial. In addition, with the lack of CAPEX spending by service providers, the efficiency and cost of operation of optical network is becoming increasingly important. Carriers are willing to spend scarce CAPEX dollars on any means to reduce network downtime that leads to financial losses for end customers and revenue penalties for carriers. Optical Performance Monitors are becoming an increasingly important solution to this problem.

Optoplex’s OPM uses a scanning tunable filter for demultiplexing and needs only a single-element photo-detector for measuring channel power and center wavelength. Operating under continuous scan by the tunable filter over wavelength rather than taking discrete data by a detector array, Optoplex’s OPM has high wavelength resolution (<40 pm) and low channel cross-talk (>30 dB). Using an innovative optical design and utilizing high-grade single detector, channel OSNR measurement range can be reliably increased to >30 dB.

Optoplex has committed to fully qualify it’s OPM product by Telcordia GR-1312 and GR-63 standards. The OPM product family is easily customizable to meet the specific requirements of all optical transport platforms.

For more information, please write to info@optoplex.com or call (510) 490-9930.