Amphenol Corporation

Timothy Edward Clark

Donald W Duda

In a fiber optic communications system in which channel insertion and removal is carried out by a plurality of modular cascaded multiplexer and demultiplexer components, the respective common outputs and inputs of the multiplexer and demultiplexer components are connected to bi-directional or uni-directional combiners arranged to combine or separate groups of channels for transmission over a single fiber transmission cable. The combiners each include one or more optical circulators.

Multi-channel fiber optic communications system and

A multiple channel fiber optic multiplexer, demultiplexer, multiplexer/demultiplexer, and/or add/drop component includes a plurality of Mach-Zehnder interferometer units, each unit including a pair of 50/50 fiber optic couplers connected by a pair of Bragg gratings and three functional ports including two multi-channel input output ports, one single channel input/output port, the Bragg gratings being tuned to a wavelength of the single channel input/output port, and input/output ports of adjacent interferometer units being connected to each other by fusion splices in a cascade configuration, the component including a first common input/output connector on a first of said cascaded interferometer units and a second common input/output connector on a last of said cascaded interferometer units, with the second common input/output connector being arranged to permit the addition of add-on multi-channel components. The cascaded components, which can be uni-directional or bi-directional, can be connected to each other as serial add-on units, or in the case of modular uni-directional components, be used to upgrade existing NWDM systems to DWDM systems having a greater number of channels by utilizing the existing NWDM components as combiners to connect the cascaded uni-directional components in parallel.

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Lisle, IL, United States of America

Timothy Edward Clark