Finisar Flexes WSS Muscle

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Finisar Corporation (NASDAQ:FNSR - News), the market leader in Wavelength Selective Switches (WSS), today introduced its new Flexgrid™ technology. Flexgrid™ enables dynamic control of channel center frequency and channel bandwidth within a WSS, from 50 GHz to 200 GHz in 12.5 GHz steps, with no penalty on any aspect of WSS performance. Flexgrid™ draws upon the inherent flexibility and performance of Finisar's Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) optical engine to address carrier demand for flexible bandwidth-capable ROADMs in next-generation networks.

The need for increased network capacity, efficiency, and flexibility is driving the introduction of higher data rates, new transmission formats, and channel management technologies. These all require flexible bandwidth capable ROADMs. For example, the introduction of coherent techniques enables 100 Gbit/s transmission within a 50 GHz channel. However, higher speed traffic, including future 400 Gbit/s and 1 Tbit/s signals, will not fit into such a narrow channel. To maximize network capacity and future-proof a carrier's investment in transmission hardware, the channel bandwidth in both the WSS and the add-drop components required for contentionless, directionless, colorless (CDC) architectures must therefore be dynamically variable to accommodate new transmission formats and data rates.

"Channel-width flexibility is increasingly sought by major telecom carriers as a way to maximize bandwidth-efficiency in the network," said Andrew Schmitt, Senior Analyst with Infonetics Research. "Flexible Grid functionality offered by leading suppliers, like Finisar, allows an optical network to accommodate advanced optical transmission techniques."

Finisar Corp. (Nasdaq: FNSR)