Phoenix Photonics, a developer and supplier of components for few mode fibre (FMF), plans to demonstrate its latest product – the cladding-pumped few-mode erbium-doped fibre amplifier (FM-EDFA) – at ECOC 2015.
The product adds to the company’s product range targeted at the space division multiplexing (SDM) market, which exploits new types of optical fibre. It complements the core-pumped amplifier that was released in 2014, providing different options for researchers investigating mode-division multiplexing (MDM) transmission using few mode fibres.
The product is a direct result of work undertaken in MODE-GAP, the European collaborative R&D project investigating SDM to address the potential future capacity crunch within the telecommunications networks. The MODE-GAP project has brought together leading European organisations to explore MDM as a potential method to enhance the capacity of communications networks.
The result of four years’ R&D focussed activity by the Optoelectronics Research Centre at University of Southampton, the new FM-EDFA was developed to form part of the transmission experiments for the project.
Project manager and Phoenix CEO, Dr. Ian Giles, said: “We are very excited to demonstrate the first commercially available FM-EDFA that has been a key component in achieving the excellent transmission results within MODE-GAP. Developing the amplifier to an integrated instrument has been very challenging and we are pleased to be in a position to offer this six-mode version with high performance specification.”
The new FM-EDFA will be manufactured by Phoenix Photonics and is fully compatible with the OFS designed six-mode fibres.
“When the project was initiated in 2009 there were no components commercially available to build transmission experiments,” added Dr. Giles. “The required components were researched and demonstrated within the project and several of these have now been commercialised.”