WOBURN, Mass. -- Aegis Lightwave, a company focused exclusively on providing best-in-class optical channel monitoring solutions to the fiber-optic communications industry, introduced today the CTM 1350, an ultra-compact 40 x 23 x 9 mm channel monitor, about the size of a thumb drive. The CTM 1350 will be on exhibit at OFC/NFOEC 2011 in Booth 2447.

The cost and size of the CTM 1350 is ideal for dense reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) line cards that continue to pack more functionality including wavelength switching, optical amplification and channel monitoring in a denser footprint. As ROADM functionality migrates to the edge of the optical network, size and cost become the dominant enabling factors.

"Aegis continues to forge ahead with our mission to advance the state of the art in channel monitors," said Jeff Farmer, President and CEO, Aegis Lightwave. "The CTM 1350 is now available to customers and serves a growing trend to increasingly monitor more points on the ROADM line card than has previously been possible."

Engineers at Aegis were able to dramatically reduce the size and cost of the channel monitor function by leveraging the latest generation of digital electronics and by developing innovative, computationally efficient algorithms. The CTM 1350 is less than half the size of its predecessor, the CTM 1250, which was already by far the smallest channel monitor on the market in its class until now. A unique feature of CTM 1350 is the I2C interface that allows system designers to communicate efficiently with multiple channel monitors distributed on a line card.

Aegis Lightwave Inc.