Together, the 75 finalist companies, including the 12 winning companies, have contributed $5.6 billion in export earnings to the Australian economy, and employed more than 10,000 people spanning across the industries of agribusiness, arts, education and training, energy, services and manufacturing.

Australia’s esteemed Trade Minister, Craig Emerson, hosted the event and acknowledged Finisar as a part of the wide array of high caliber companies that reflect the depth and diversity of the Australian economy.

Simon Poole, Director of New Business Ventures at Finisar Australia received the award and stated “We are honored to have had our efforts and successes recognized by Austrade and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. A big thank you for the acknowledgement and support!” Watch Simon Poole’s acceptance speech here.

To quote the judges: “With the exponential growth of data capacity on the internet, the demand for more flexible and efficient optical network services from telecoms carriers is ever increasing. Finisar has met this demand with its new Flexgrid technology. Flexgrid is a unique software enhancement which allows telecommunications carriers to deploy bandwidth, flexibly and dynamically in their networks. Well ahead of their global competitors, Finisar have overcome several engineering challenges and have now successfully launched Flexgrid to the market.”

A video of Steve’s acceptance speech can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPvnMeLIJdI

Finisar was also represented at the ceremony by Andrew Bartos, Steve Frisken and Simon Poole, who, along with Steve Winnall and the MC for the evening, Sally Dominguez from the New Inventors TV Show, are shown in the photo below.

Congratulations to all involved in the Flexgrid™ program – and thank you for your hard work and dedication which have made the project so successful.

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.

Better fibres, please.

Silica is a wonderful material and we all love it dearly for its incredible transparency, strength and (now we know how to do it) ease of processing. However, it still isn’t ideal. It does have some loss and, possibly even worse, has a level of non-linearity. The combination of the two means that we still don’t have the perfect transmission medium. So my first Christmas wish is for a fibre which has zero loss and no non-linearity. Maybe some of the hollow-core Photonic Crystal Fibre designs that have been proposed will get us there in the end, but I haven’t seen any signs of real progress towards practical, manufacturable designs which could be useful in a real-world transmission system. Since we will therefore always have some form of loss, this leads to my second wish…

More Gain.

Since we don’t have zero loss fibres, we need optical amplifiers. As an industry, we have been incredibly fortunate that the EDFA gain region and the minimum loss window of silica coincide so well. This has supported the development of DWDM systems in all their shapes and sizes over the past 25 years. However, as we keep pushing system capacity, we’re running out of gain in the EDFA (even allowing for L-band) and having to drag Raman amplifiers kicking and screaming into the mainstream of technology. However, Raman amplification has its own issues (particularly noise figure) and what we’d really like is an amplifier with 0dB noise figure, 30+ dB of gain, saturated output powers of >+20dBm and operating over a 200nm bandwidth. Phase Sensitive Amplifiers show some promise here, although the technology is still very immature and is unproven at a network level.

Polarisation be gone.

With the imminent introduction of coherent transmission systems, Polarisation Mode Dispersion (PMD) will no longer be the bugbear it was for high-speed 40G systems. However, our old friend PDL (Polarisation Dependent Loss) now becomes a limiting factor, so my final wish is for optical components with no PDL (or Polarisation Dependent Gain – PDG).

I am sure there are other things we could wish for– let me know your thoughts and suggestions.

In the meantime, have a cool yule and a restive festive.

In the optical space, we have, over the past 15 years, moved to higher and higher per-channel bit rates running on more-closely-spaced WDM channels. However, we are (as I mentioned previously) reaching the limit of what can be achieved on the ITU Grid-based systems introduced in the 1990s. Consequently, fibre bandwidth, which only a few years ago was being proselytised by Gilder as being effectively ‘infinite’, is increasingly being seen as a finite resource which needs to be managed as effectively as possible using all the techniques at our disposal.

One solution, which is gaining a great deal of traction at the moment is to move away from the constraints of the ITU Grid to what we term a flexible grid architecture where the channel optical bandwidth can be dynamically adjusted to meet the requirements of the signal being sent through it and hence maximise the data carrying capacity of the fibre.

This ability to control the channel bandwidth and position with GHz resolution has been utilized in many research papers as I discussed in my previous blog. In practice, however, the complexity of managing a network with such fine granularity may outweigh its advantages. Market requirements indicate that a channel bandwidth granularity of 12.5 GHz will meet future channel bandwidth requirements and that even 25 GHz channel bandwidth increments may be sufficient.

First generation WSS (typically based on MEMS and/or Liquid Crystal technologies) allocate a single switching element (pixel) to each channel which means that the channel bandwidth and centre frequency are fixed at the time of manufacture and cannot be changed in service. However, second generation WSS, based on Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) or 2D MEMS mega-pixel matrix switching arrays, permit dynamic control of channel centre frequency and bandwidth through ‘on the fly’ modification of internal pixel arrays via embedded software.

Furthermore, not only must the core switching elements in a ROADM be capable of supporting flexible grid architectures, but the multiplexer/demultiplexers and filter arrays must support the same degree of flexibility. The flexibility provided by LCoS technology can also be applied to these high-port-count (e.g. 1×23) multiplexer/demultiplexers and programmable filter arrays.

This discussion has focused on the requirements for the wavelength-selective elements in a flexible-grid ROADM as these will be the first part of the flexible grid network that has to be deployed to ensure the network is future-proofed. However flexible grid networks will also require additional component developments including scanning optical channel monitors capable of handling polarization multiplexed signals with varying bandwidths and signal formats and signal (and local oscillator, for coherent systems) lasers capable of operating at the finer frequency increments implied by flexible grid architectures (6.25 GHz for 12.5 GHz channel increments and 12.5 GHz for 25 GHz channel increments). This provides a continuing challenge to those of us in the optical space as we continue to improve the price/performance of our components and modules which underpin the networks of the future.

Flexible grid technology (not grid-less) will allow the optimum usage of the finite operating window in a fibre and allow operators to continue down the path of reducing the cost per bit/km of data travelling through the network.

Any comments are welcome.