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US 7,352,928 B2Granted
Tunable optical add/drop multiplexer
AssigneeJDS Uniphase Corporation
InventorsBo Chen, Bo Cai, Yatao Yang, Ming Liang, Xiaobiao Wang
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The tunable add/drop multiplexer including a tiltable mirror, a fixed thin film filter, and first and second retro-reflector elements for redirecting express channels back out an input/output port and for redirecting drop channels back out an add/drop port, respectively.
Claims15
A tunable optical add/drop module (TOADM) comprising:
- an input/output port for inputting an input optical beam with a plurality of optical wavelength channels, and for outputting an output optical beam with at least one of the plurality of optical wavelength channels;
- an add/drop port for outputting a drop beam with at least one of the optical wavelength channels;
- a tiltable mirror rotatable about a rotation axis to one of a plurality of tilt angles for directing the optical beam along one of a plurality of different paths;
- a fixed thin film filter (TFF) positioned to receive the input optical beam along any one of the plurality of different paths for splitting the optical beam into a transmittance beam, which includes the at least one drop channel, and a reflection beam, which includes at least one of the plurality of optical channels in the output beam, wherein each one of the plurality of different paths corresponds to a different wavelength channel to be dropped;
- a first general retro-reflector means for reflecting said transmitted beam back with a lateral shift in position to the add/drop port via the thin film filter and the tiltable mirror;
- and
- a second general retro-reflector means for reflecting said reflected beam back to the input/output port via the thin film filter and the tiltable mirror.
4 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.