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KCCO7913

10/14/21 1:07 PM

#82039 RE: Tleprathy #82038

A modulator is one of several components within a transceiver that processes the 1’s and 0’s with photons.

The LWLG patents show 4-8 modulators per transceiver.

A single hyper-scale data center can have over 100,000 transceivers within all the equipment.
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Photonics_Guy

10/14/21 1:15 PM

#82041 RE: Tleprathy #82038

It’s a good question.

A Modulator is part of the transmit (Tx) path of a photonics link. A photonics transmitter requires a laser to provide the optical signal on which to modulate the data waveform. That is the purpose of the Modulator, to modulate the incoming laser signal with the data signal.

The receive path uses either a photo-detector (AM modulation) or a phase discriminator (phase modulation) to recover the data signal from the transmitted lightwave signal being sent from a remote location over fiber. A Modulator is not used in the receive (Rx) path.

A Transceiver contains both Tx and Rx paths in a single package. It is becoming more and more common to have multiple Tx/Rx paths in a single transceiver package.

Hope this helps.

PG