19 September 2003 Oxford, UK Lightwave -- Kamelian Ltd. announced today a key design win for the company's low cost amplification products based on Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOA). The contract was awarded by BTI Photonic Systems, which will use the SOAs for use in its recently announced range of amplified CWDM products.
"We are very pleased that BTI have chosen to adopt our SOA technology," contends Bob Press, Kamelian's vice president of marketing. "Not only does the SOA improve on the cost and performance of the EDFA in DWDM systems, but it also offers clear advantages in CWDM systems where there is no competing amplifier technology."
BTI Photonic Systems has expanded its Netstender system platform from SONET and DWDM to include CWDM applications. "By integrating Kamelian's SOAs, we're able to provide amplifier modules as part of a complete CWDM optical layer solution," reports Chris Egner, vice president of business development and sales at BTI. "We're helping to make CWDM network deployments practical."
Compared to incumbent technologies, SOAs offer the key advantage of integration capability with other active and passive components--operation across a wide range of wavelengths from 1270 nm to 1610 nm--and the opportunity to further reduce cost with monolithic arrays of individual SOA elements. Kamelian's existing products include optical pre-amplifiers with high gain (>20 dB) and optical boosters with high output power (>13 dBm), operating both at 1310 nm as well as in the C-band, S-band, and L-band. CWDM applications require optical amplifiers that can amplify over the S-band (1460- to 1540-nm) and the C/L-bands (1540- to 1620-nm). Erbium-based amplifiers can neither handle the wavelengths or the large optical bandwidths required.