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OT: All Optical transistors could upend computing

Start-up delivers more modest product first, though.

By TIM GREENE
Network World, 06/25/01

SAN DIEGO - Start-up All Optical
Networks is sitting on top of patents that
could potentially alter the basics of
computing, but for now are focused on a
multiplexer that can cut the costs of setting
up optical metropolitan-area networks.

The company holds patents on the concept
and technology for photonic transistors,
devices that would act like conventional
transistors, but use light instead of electricity
to drive them. This technology could lead to
photonic processors that could operate
faster than current processors.

"This would create a fundamental change in
processing if they pull it off," says Victor
Valdevia, an analyst with Hudson River
Analytics.

The technology was conceived by All
Optical's chief science officer John Hait in
1989. Hait and others developed the
technology until last year, when All Optical was formed to commercialize it.
It employs holograms - representations of light interference patterns - to
create photonic transistors that amplify, switch or detect light signals.

Arrays of these transistors can create integrated photonic circuits that can
perform logic functions the way electronic transistors can in traditional
processors. The main advantage of photonic transistors is speed, All Optical
COO Ralph Bennett says.

Bennett, who was a founder of Mitel Semiconductor, RSA Security and
PMC Sierra, retired in 1996. But when he saw the technology Hait and the
others had, he came out of retirement to sign on as All Optical's CEO.

This spring, Japanese researchers at the National Institute of Advanced
Industrial Science and Technology developed a photonic transistor using
different technology. But Valdevia says All Optical is closer to commercially
manufacturing its transistor.

Before it delivers an optical transistor, though, the company is selling a more
pragmatic device called MetroScout, which multiplexes 1310 nm, short-haul
optical signals without having to convert them to 1550 nm signals, cutting the
cost of such multiplexing in half, according to Bennett.

Until MetroScout, multiplexing 1310 nm signals onto a single fiber could not
be done directly. The only way to multiplex was to use dense wavelength
division multiplexing, which requires use of 1550 nm wavelengths.

So before service providers could multiplex, they had to make a conversion,
which required turning the 1310 nm signal into an electrical signal and
regenerating it as a 1550 nm signal. Such regeneration requires hardware to
perform the optical to electrical to optical (OEO) conversion as well as a
separate set of lasers to generate the signal.

MetroScout also uses half the power of traditional OEO devices, All
Optical says. MetroScout separates 1310 nm wavelengths enough so they
don't interfere with each other on a single fiber, but Bennett would not say
how that is done.

MetroScout will be available next spring. Pricing has not been set.

http://www.nwfusion.com/edge/news/2001/122114_06-25-2001.html