Mitel's DWDM breakthrough causes share price to rise

17 Jun 2002

Engineers at Mitel Semiconductor have produced working prototypes of a 40 channel multiplexing device which has a footprint per channel five times smaller than competing alternatives. The announcement caused the company's share value to rise by 20%.

Mitel employed a form of grating known as an Echelle Grating and tapped into its proven semiconductor fabrication expertise to develop a number of proprietary, patentable techniques. The result may lead to a higher-capacity, single-chip device based on standard semiconductor materials that dramatically alters the economics of high-speed optical communications.

"Moving this technology to silicon instead of relying on more expensive and exotic materials, holds significant promise for cheaper, more reliable devices that are essential for high-speed optical transmission," said Dr. R. Normandin, director general, Institute for Microstructural Sciences, National Research Council of Canada. "Mitel's approach will positively influence performance and cost limitations."

"This is an example of what some people call disruptive technology," said Moris Simson, senior vice president and chief technology and marketing officer, Mitel Corporation. "By being able to etch deep enough, smooth enough and vertical enough into silica, we have laid the foundation for dramatic improvements in the capacity, size and cost of these devices."

"With a 40 channel multiplexing device, we believe our footprint per channel is five times smaller than competing alternatives, " said Dr. John Miller, Director of Photonics, Mitel Semiconductor. With this level of miniaturization, our approach provides unprecedented scalability leading to higher capacities and reduces the need for expensive, highly specialized amplifiers in the network. Mitel's current prototype conforms to the ITU-T grid with 100 GHz channel spacing. An 80-channel 50 GHz device is also in development."

The optical multiplexer family of products resulting from this research will be called LightRider and will be targeted to DWDM equipment serving metropolitan area networks. Mitel expects to provide its lead customers with LightRider samples for evaluation by early next year.