JANUARY 23, 2008 -- Aegis Lightwave (search for Aegis) says it has been granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office entitled "Tunable Optical Filter on a CTE-Matched Transparent Substrate" (US Patent No. 7,304,799). This follows another patent issued in China in October 2007 entitled "Index Tunable Thin Film Interference Coatings" (China Patent No. ZL02812224.0). These patents cover some of the key aspects behind the device design and fabrication of dynamically tunable thin-film interference filters that include layers with a thermo-optically tunable refractive index.
Thermo-optically tunable thin-film filters form the basis of Aegis's "Active Thin-Films" technology platform, which that company is using to address a rapidly growing market for low-cost DWDM channel monitors in ROADM applications. The two patents bring the number of issued patents for this technology platform to eight. Several other patents related to this technology are pending.
"These two new issued patents cover key design aspects of our tunable optical filter technology and showcase the simplicity and robustness of the device design," said Jeff Farmer, president and CEO of Aegis Lightwave. "Our tunable thin-film filters have, as a result of these attributes, been time and again the technology of choice for channel monitoring in the growing fiber-optic communications market."
Aegis provides optical channel monitors based on combining a tunable optical thin-film filter with a single photodiode in a small transistor outline (TO) package. The company says the tunable filter scans the entire C- or L-band optical spectrum that may contain wavelengths with any mix of bit rates up to 40 Gbits/sec and reports each wavelength's optical power to a host DWDM transmission system.
The products are Telcordia qualified and RoHS compliant. They are available in single-, dual- and quad-port configurations.
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