General Information

Serial #

Prototype

Part Number

1

Total Parts

2

AKA

N/A

Patents

N/A

General Description

Ferrous metal casing/ Metal wiring and parts/ Synthetic connector, wire covering and parts

Dimensions

Note: These reflect the general size for storage and are not necessarily representative of the object's true dimensions.

Length

3.8 cm

Width

3.0 cm

Height

1.1 cm

Thickness

N/A

Weight

N/A

Diameter

N/A

Volume

N/A

Lexicon

Group

Communications

Category

Telephony

Sub-Category

N/A

Manufacturer

AKA

Nortel

Country

England

State/Province

Unknown

City

Paignton

Context

Country

Worldwide

State/Province

Unknown

Period

2000+

Canada

Designed at Nortel optical lab at 3500 Carling Ave., Ottawa, in the early 1990s. This is one of several hundred prototypes. Nortel was the first optical equipment vendor to introduce optical transmitters and receivers able to operate at 10 Gbps, the OC192 industry standard for fibre optic networks. As a result, Nortel enjoyed market dominance in these products for the rest of the decade. Nortel was also the first large-scale manufacturer to embrace tunable lasers

Function

A device used to provide and amplify a tunable laser light source for a fibre optic network.

Technical

Consists of three tunable distributed feedback (DFB) lasers integrated with a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). Tunable lasers are designed for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), where multiple channels of data are combined on a single fibre by assigning each its own wavelength, or 'colour'. In a tunable DFB laser, the wavelength that it emits is controlled by the temperature of the laser cavity, which can be adjusted for the desired output. Tunable lasers obviated the need to carry a large inventory of lasers that each can only emit one colour, in OC192 applications, effecting a reduction from 160 to 8 separate devices. They are difficult to manufacture however, and due to low yields they are very expensive. For this reason, as of 2005, they had not been sold in large quantities.

Area Notes

Unknown

Details

Markings

None

Missing

Casing part

Finish

Gold coloured casing/ White wire covering with white joiner/ Red and black connector with plated part/ Plated guards

Decoration

N/A