Wednesday at OFC
Reported By Kristin Lewotsky
OFC '98 hit its stride on Wednesday, with a record 8400 attendees clogging the exhibit aisles and session rooms. In the face of standing room only technical sessions, conference attendees frequently gave up and watched the most popular papers from 30 in. monitors stationed in the hallway outside of each meeting room. Every vendor queried was uniformly enthusiastic about the response and the number of sales leads gleaned from the crowd. All across San Jose, no hotel rooms were to be had for the late arrivals -- OFC '98 took over the town.
Metropolitan area wavelength division multiplexing was the big buzz at this meeting. After years of focusing on long-haul point-to-point networks, companies are now beginning to address ring configured short-haul networks.Ciena described its upcoming metro WDM product, and Nortel exhibited a suite of components specifically tailored for that market. Nortel displayed 16-channel dielectric filters and 40-channel arrayed waveguide gratings, as well as a wideband metro gain block featuring the low gains sufficient for these short-haul, ring applications.
Cooperative efforts
In an announcement that underscored the components nature of its telecommunications products division, Corning announced that it provided the optical amplifier for the Lucent Technologies WaveStar 80-channel WDM system. The FiberGain amplifier features an intelligent on-board amplifier control that can rapidly increase or decrease power automatically, while still maintaining a flat signal over more than 32 nm of the erbium passband. The control features of the amplifier enable the WaveStar system to be self-regulating, offering a cost savings and performance advantage to end-users.
Company cooperation was an ongoing theme at OFC '98, as a group of companies including AMP Inc. (Harrisburg, PA), Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, CA), Siecor Corp., US Conec Ltd., and Fujikura Corp. unveiled a new connector design that they hope will be adopted as a TIA standard by installers; the decision is to be announced Thursday, February 27.
Designed for premises and datacom applications, the MT-RJ is an optical RJ-style plug and jack similar to the RJ-45 used in copper cabling. The compact design permits a duplex plug to be fit into the same area as a conventional single-fiber plug, allowing system integrators to double the port density for each circuit board. AMP, Siecor Corp. and Fujikura developed the MT-RJ connector with US Conec, a leading ferrule supplier. Hewlett-Packard and AMP have developed fiberoptic transceivers incorporating the MT-RJ connectors.
Up On Thursday
The postdeadline sessions are scheduled for Thursday. Look for summaries of several top papers on Friday, with extended discussions to follow. Look also for details on the Asahi Glass demonstration of WDM over plastic optical fiber.