Getting fiber optic networks ready for the world of tomorrow
Fiber optics are lightning fast in data communication, and with new technologies this fast and reliable technology will get ready for tomorrow’s world
From the report:
In the WESORAM project, short for Wellenlängenselektive Schalter für optisches Raummultiplex (Wavelength-Selective Switches for Optical Space-Division Multiplexing), Dr. Steffen Trautmann and his team at Fraunhofer IOF worked with project partners to refine this technology. First the team added flexibility to the switching mechanism in the LCoS switch so it would be able to redirect the data stream to any fiber. Once the spectrometer grating has split the incoming light signal into frequencies, the LCoS mirror sends each frequency to a different fiber. This expands conventional wavelength-division multiplexing into a space-division multiplexing technique. To supplement the principle of “multiple frequencies on one fiber,” this means the principle of “one frequency, multiple fibers” can also be applied.
As their next step, the researchers from Jena succeeded in increasing the resolution of the optical module with a newly developed grating. “Right now, spectral resolution of 100 GHz, or about 0.8 nm, is the state of the art. The mirror we developed can achieve up to 25 GHz, or approximately 0.2 nm,” Trautmann explains. The higher resolution means the light frequency for the data stream is narrower in band by a factor of four, so the data packets are proportionally smaller. And that in turn means the light conductors can transmit many more data packets simultaneously.
The project partners were Adtran, a company in Meiningen (Thuringia) that specializes in networks, and Berlin-based Holoeye, which focuses on optical systems and built the LCoS mirror. The experts from Fraunhofer IOF were responsible for the optical design. They also used ultra-precision technology to develop a beam splitter for the spectrometer grating and integrated all of the components into a single tiny part.
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