Advanced Tunable Optical Filter for Fiber Optic Communications Network

Fiber optic communication networks utilizing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) have been shown to be the most promising for realizing enormous bandwidth (terabit) for information transport and processing. A key device in the wideband WDM netowrk is a wavelength selective crossconnect for efficient routing of optical signals. Among the various approaches, the acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) has shown to be the most promising due to its unique capabiity of simultaneously and independently routing a number of wavelength channels. It suffers the basic limitation of unacceptable crosstalk due to high sidelobes and the complexity of construction of the polarization independent version. Aurora Associates proposes a new type of high performance AOTF that overcomes these basic deficiencies. The objective of the Phase I effort is to design, fabricate, test and demonstrate feasibility models of the advanced AOTF with the performance goals of 1 nm bandwidth, -30 dB sidelobe, 3 dB insertion loss, and polarization independent operation without the use of polarization beam splitters.