WILMINGTON, Mass. -- DuPont Photonics Technologies, a provider of practical integrated optical components and a wholly owned subsidiary of DuPont, announced today the industry’s first normally dark variable optical attenuator (VOA) arrays based on planar lightwave circuitry (PLC). As a new member of the family of DuPont™ iVOATM, the normally dark VOA arrays are ideal for use in intelligent wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems and optical add drop multiplexer (OADM) modules for channel and band balancing, power control and dynamic gain equalization.

Based on DuPont’s proven and Telcordia-qualified library of optical building blocks, the iVOATM family of products integrates up to 40 channels of variable optical attenuators on a single chip, significantly reducing cost and footprint. DuPont’s VOA arrays operate across C and L bands with low insertion loss, low polarization dependent loss (PDL), low wavelength dependent loss (WDL), low power consumption, and simple electronic control. The iVOATM chips are hermetically packaged to provide excellent reliability. In addition, the iVOATM products have no moving parts and are stable to mechanical shock and mechanical vibrations. The new normally dark VOA arrays allow for greater than 45dB signal blocking at loss of electrical power.

“This new application compliments our commercially available normally light VOA arrays to satisfy different customer needs,” said Chuck Xu, vice president of marketing and business development at DuPont Photonics. “We are glad that through the integrated optics approach we are able to provide the additional ‘normally dark’ feature without incurring additional costs.” DuPont is currently shipping normally light VOA arrays of 4-40 channels in commercial volumes and 4-20 channel normally dark VOA arrays in engineering volumes.

DuPont Photonics Technologies LLC