Finisar WaveShaper S/X Product Demonstration at ECOC 2011

ECOC 2011 Wrap-Up

More than 350 exhibitors from around the world convened in Geneva, Switzerland in September for the annual ECOC tradeshow which gathered more than 5,000 attendees.

Gearing up for ECOC, Finisar introduced several new products including the world’s first 1×20 High Port Count WSS for telecom networks and the WaveShaper 1000S/X and 4000S/X for optical system testing applications. Check back on Lightspeed later this week for a demo video of the new WaveShaper.

Other company highlights at ECOC included live demonstrations of the industry’s first 40 Gb/s Multi-Rate Serial CFP-FR optical module and the 10 Gb/s DWDM 80km SFP+ Optical Transceiver (you can also check back later this week for a video demo of our new SFP+). It was great to see so much activity stir around these demos at the Finisar booth!

We also introduced a new Finisar GPON Stick for PON applications. As always, we enjoyed showcasing our latest products and innovative technology at this international event.

As ECOC 2011 came to an end and we made our way back across the pond, we turned our thoughts to a great fall season and already look forward to seeing all of you at next year’s event in Amsterdam.

Finisar Australia Wins Prestigious Engineering Award

This week’s post comes from guest blogger, Dr. Simon Poole.

Us Australians are well known for being quiet, shy, retiring types, so it was great to get a chance to celebrate when Finisar Australia won the prestigious Bradfield Award at the Engineering Excellence Awards held in Sydney last month. The J.J.C. Bradfield Award is presented to the overall winner of Sydney Division of Engineers Australia Excellence Awards. It recognises an accomplishment of exceptional engineering merit and was presented to Finisar for the development of the Flexgrid™ capability for the DWP family of Wavelength Selective Switches.

Finisar’s FlexGrid™ is a flexible software enhancement within the company’s range of Wavelength Selective Switches (WSS) which allows telecommunications carriers to re-route signals throughout their network.

“A FlexGrid WSS can be used for instance if someone digs up a cable by accident. The telecommunication provider can use it to re-route traffic of phone and internet so phones don’t drop out. It can also be used on occasions like Mother’s Day when capacity goes up – carriers can use the Flexgrid to add more capacity to their network,” says Dr Steve Winnall, Director of Product Engineering at Finisar Australia.

“There are problems with the current legacy system which telecommunication provider now use. For example, in situations like the City-to-Surf (a major fun-run in Sydney attracting over 35,000 competitors) people couldn’t make a mobile call because there were so many people in one location. Our product helps to alleviate that and provide a better quality of service. This is a great success story in terms of manufacturing and innovation in Australia as 99 per cent of our sales have been through export, so it is a device that is being used all over the world.”

The judges said the Flexgrid is an innovation that “overcomes the current constraint associated with fixed channel plans used in current optical networks. It is a unique and world leading product in optical fibre telecommunications.

Finisar also won two other categories for its WaveShaper and DWP products and the Flexgrid product was also highly commended in the Innovations and inventions category.

The black-tie presentation dinner was attended by 10 Finisar employees who are pictured with the award below.

All three Finisar winners on the night now advance to the national finals to be held in Canberra in November.

Visit Finisar at CIOE 2011

Finisar is excited to exhibit at the 13th annual CIOE tradeshow expo in Shenzhen, China next week, September 6-9. Be sure to visit Finisar booth #T266 as we will display equipment from our wide portfolio of optical communication products including transceivers, transponders, wavelength selective switches, advanced optical components, and passive devices. We are also planning a live demonstration on the tradeshow floor of our WaveShaper 4000S, a multiport optical processor for system test applications such as pulse generation and shaping, optical component emulation, and DWDM system testing.

We hope to see you there!

Finisar Malaysia Celebrates 10 Years

This week’s blog post comes from KW Hoo, the Vice President of Operations at Finisar Malaysia.
Yes! The magic number! Perfect 10!

Ipoh – a city in the state of Perak, Malaysia houses the biggest Finisar entity with more than 5,000 employees.

Finisar Malaysia is set on twenty acres of land with 640,000 square feet of manufacturing space. About one third of this space is suitable for clean room operations.

It all began when Finisar Corporation decided to transfer most of its manufacturing processes from a contractor to our very own facility to enable greater control of internal quality, intellectual property and cost-effectiveness. Finisar Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. was registered as a legal entity in 2001 and started operations with a pioneer batch of 47 employees.

The rest is history. By fiscal year 2007, Finisar Malaysia had become the largest transceiver manufacturing facility in the world and a major contributing factor to the overall success of the company. Today, we are shipping more than 16 million modules per year and continuing to grow.

Ipoh is proud to have such an energetic and talented team of employees from many different countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Kampuchea, India and Czech Republic. We speak English, Malay, Chinese, Tagalog, Myanmar, Khmer, Tamil and Urdu.

We are proud to be part of Finisar and look forward to another 10 years!