Avanex Corporation

Mingjun Zhao

Xuehua Wu

John Feng

Giovanni Barbarossa

A reconfigurable thin film based dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) device is described for hitless switching of wavelengths by employing a reconfigurable filtering device. The reconfigurable filtering device is based on a mechanical switching of a filtering chip which has a thin film coated a first one-half of a first face for interference wavelength filtering and has a gold-mirror coated on a second one-half of the first face for high reflection.

Reconfigurable thin film based DWDM devices for reconfigurable add-drop optical systems

The present invention describes a structure and method for a multi-ports WDM device for compensating the filter distortion while reducing insertion loss. The multi-ports WDM device comprises a 4-fiber collimator having a grin lens and a 2-fiber collimator having a lens where the focal plane of the second lens is shorter than the focal plane of the first grin lens Ands with aspheric surface. When a light signal travels through the first lens in the 4-fiber collimator to a filter, the film on the filter causes distortion to the light signal resulting in a large insertion loss. To compensate for the insertion loss, the lens on the 2-fiber collimator has a aspheric function and a shorter focal plane than the grin lens on the 4-fiber collimator. The type of grin lens used in the 4-fiber collimator is different than the lens used in the 2-fiber collimator. Effectively, the lens in the 2-fiber collimator operates to de-focus a light signal relative to the grin lens in the 4-fiber collimator.

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Mingjun Zhao