31 July 2003 Woburn, MA Lightwave -- Optical components and subsystems manufacturer Aegis Semiconductor has begun commercial shipments of its first product--the mosquito Optical Channel Monitor (OCM). Based on the company's Active Thin Films technology platform, the mosquito OCM delivers the performance of traditional OCMs at a significantly smaller size and lower price, say company representatives.
"With the mosquito OCM, Aegis has made a significant step in meeting today's critical telecommunications industry requirements to deliver equipment vendors with maximum value for a minimal capital investment," contends Matthias Wagner, founder and chief executive officer, Aegis Semiconductor. "Aegis is redefining the economics of tunable optics by delivering them at the price of passive optics with the Active Thin Films platform."
The mosquito OCM provides full C- or L-band monitoring and is designed to be embedded into WDM add/drop nodes, repeaters, and terminal equipment at very low cost. The mosquito OCM enables self-monitoring, self-management, automatic fault isolation, and simplified network management--all critical requirements for intelligent transmission systems. According to the company, it's an ideal tool for intelligent control of pump power levels, VOAs, gain tilters, or dynamic gain equalizers. Designed to comply with Telcordia GR-468 requirements, the mosquito OCM is manufactured using wafer-scale processing, wafer-scale testing, and low-cost TO-can packaging.
Aegis representatives say the mosquito OCM is 50% less expensive than currently available OCMs.