News

ECOC focus: NP Photonics eyes Europe

15 August 2002

Continuing our weekly series on companies exhibiting at the ECOC trade show (Copenhagen, Denmark, 9-11 September), Lisa van Beurden talks to NP Photonics, a US start-up with a new take on optical-fiber amplifiers.

"There's going to be a lot of camaraderie [at the show]," said Daryl Eigen, summing up the projected mood for ECOC. "All of us [exhibitors] are in similar straits, with the carriers not buying and the trickle down effect that that has," continued NP Photonics' senior vice-president of marketing and sales.

This begs a question: why invest money on trade exhibitions and conferences when the telecom market is languishing in such a deep hole? Simple: it's all about presence, especially as Europe is home to big-name systems houses like Siemens, Alcatel and Marconi.

"We consider ECOC to be a very efficient method for us to gain access to the European market, and to expose our products to a number of different players," said Eigen. "If there are fewer of us exhibiting we feel that's actually better for us."

Eigen says NP will feature two products from its erbium-doped micro-fiber amplifier (EMFA) family. One is a low-powered "gainlet" that can be integrated into either a higher-powered amplifier or even into passive components like multiplexers and demultiplexers. The second product is similar, but it's used as a gain-block technology and incorporated into a miniature amplifier for low-powered metro amplification.

Also on display will be a tunable filter made by Parvenu, the MEMS-based company that NP acquired last month. "We have plans to combine our tunable filter and our amplifier glass technology to eventually provide a tunable fiber laser," explained Eigen.

The key to NP's products is its proprietary glass-fiber technology. The EMFA is based on a special erbium-doped glass fiber that combines high gain per unit length with low cost - less than 1% of the cost of commercial erbium-doped silica fiber.

What's more, the company has demonstrated a gain of greater than 5dB/cm with its EMFA - more than 100 times larger than that of a typical silica-fiber amplifier. As a result, a compact, low-cost, rugged, and highly integrated optical amplifier can be built using just a few centimeters length of doped fiber.

The NP rationale is simple: more nodes in the metro architecture means more optical amplifiers will be required to overcome signal losses. Enter EMFAs, which will replace bulky, expensive EDFAs - with their meters of coiled erbium-doped fiber - with ultra-short, high-gain micro fibers of multicomponent glass just a few centimeters in length.

"The good news is that we're primarily focused on the metropolitan market, which has not deteriorated to the extent that the long-haul market has," explained Chuck Chandler, president and chief executive officer of NP Photonics. "So our business plan and product focus is pretty much in tact - it's just moved out a year or so."

By Lisa van Beurden, Business Reporter, fibers.org