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Follow UsNEW DELHI: Researchers at Xerox Corporation seem to have solved it. While the "off-ramps" on the information superhighway has for long been described as one-lane dirt roads because of the high cost of routing fiber optic networks to the last mile, the company on March 26 announced in Rochester that its new technology could help change just that.
The technology breaks the bandwidth barrier that exists today by integrating an Optical MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems) photonic switch with planar light circuits on a single silicon chip small enough to fit on a fingertip–a first ever achievement. The company claims that the new switch can provide rapid delivery of optical services by providing the functionality of a Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (R-OADM), a routing device that’s commonly used today but is 10 to 100 times as large and costly.
According to a company release, Joel Kubby, technical manager at Xerox’s Wilson Center for Research and Technology in Webster has already created a working prototype eight-channel reconfigurable OADM and the company intends to commercialize this technology through licensing to leading companies in the optical switching market.
Explained Kubby, "Optical networks based on our technology could go way beyond delivering on-demand DVD-quality videos in homes. Our switch could help usher in a new era of undreamed-of Internet applications, changing the way we do business, seek information and find entertainment."
And who should know it better than him for Kubby and his team have been conducting MEMS research since 1993 while they started probing the possibilities with Optical MEMS in 1998. Using Optical MEMS, Xerox is working to improve color image quality during the color reproduction process. Optical MEMS devices could eventually eliminate the need for high-cost precision manufacturing of components that stabilize movement in Xerox photoreceptor belts.
The Xerox Advantages
While existing optical networking equipment need to switch from the optical to the electronic domain, Xerox claims that the new technology enables switching in the all-optical domain. What’s more, as the switch controls the flow of light and not the flow of electrons, it is expected to be much faster, smaller and cheaper.
"With the Xerox switch, an entire R-OADM can be compressed into 2 cm x 1.5 cm in size, and can direct enormous amounts of data in ways that currently require large racks of assembled equipment," said Kubby. He added, "Our technology would let telecommunications companies install systems locally and even on utility poles".
According to experts, ‘waveguides’ are very small conductors of light, about five to six microns or 1/10 the thickness of a human hair. However, unlike the existing mirror-based MEMS switches, the Xerox MEMS waveguide shuttle acts like a miniature train track switch for the fine waveguides, thereby avoiding the problems of mirror-based versions.
The MEMS switches and waveguides are made together on a single crystal silicon wafer using widely available semiconductor processing equipment. Such on-chip integration avoids the complex alignment issues associated with manually connecting different and larger components with optical fibers, and avoids the cost and space associated with manufacturing, assembling and packaging the separate components of Add/Drop Multiplexers.
Additionally, Xerox also claims that the new technology eliminates the need for technicians to make routing changes in the field, ultimately bringing bandwidth to consumers faster. The new optical switch technology, according to Xerox, has been built on a broadly enabling MEMS fabrication platform developed under a grant provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in its Advanced Technology Program.
Xerox is the lead partner in the Optical MEMS Manufacturing Consortium, and Kubby is the principal investigator for the consortium’s project. Other partners include Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox; Corning IntelliSense, a MEMS foundry and software company; Microscan, a data acquisition firm; and Coventor, a MEMS software company. The consortium is developing a manufacturing process for Optical MEMS that can be used broadly.
And Xerox is not investing on the new technology without reasons. And the reason is the $ 101 million market of OADMs in 2001, which is expected to touch $1.03 billion in 2006 according market research firm ElectroniCast Corp.