Nortel (Brampton, ON, Canada) and Ericsson (Richardson, TX) will offer a common amplifier

Nortel (Brampton, ON, Canada) and Ericsson (Richardson, TX) will offer a common amplifier footprint, the two companies announced at the Optical Amplifier Conference in Vail, CO, this week. The common erbium-doped fiber amplifier (edfa) gain block design, also known as the Ominiblock,O is a small footprint package that features rounded corners and side exit fibers for efficient fiber management and space utilization, as well as base pins that allow direct mounting of the unit to printed circuit boards. The design enables the implementation of preamplifiers, booster amplifiers, and midstage access line amplifier products using a common board. Each vendor has released a product based on the design, with Ericsson offering the pge 60813 wavelength-division multiplexer (wdm) booster edfa gain block and Nortel the Multi-Wavelength Gain-Compact family of semicustom wdm amplifier gain blocks.