Genoa Displays Optical Amplifier

BALTIMORE, Md. – NFOEC Booth 6655 – Genoa Corporation begins first public demonstrations here today of its breakthrough linear optical amplifier, or “LOA” in a typical network application, as an expected 15,000 optical network engineers began converging on the popular National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC.) The LOA is the first chip capable of amplifying light in the demanding multi-wavelength, switched-channel environment characteristic of emerging metropolitan optical networks. The Genoa NFOEC demonstration utilizes a commercially-available, off-the-shelf, 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) optical transponder from LightLogic, Inc. that is normally capable of transmitting through 40 kilometers of optical fiber. By adding a single Genoa amplifier – which when packaged is smaller than a sugar cube – the range of the transponder is extended to greater than 80 kilometers (48 miles). Genoa first announced the LOA in March of this year, and has recently completed its build-out of the world’s first indium-phosphide manufacturing facility for linear optical amplifiers.During the entire show, Genoa will be continuously tracking the bit-error rates. The company expects that out of 150 trillion data bits sent each day through the 80-kilometer spools of fiber in their booth, there will be several to no incorrect bits. Such performance would exceed the telecom industry’s minimum standard of 1 bit-error per trillion bits of data by one-to-two orders of magnitude. “Genoa’s LOA is completely in sync with LightLogic’s goal of offering innovative, highly integrated components and subsystems for the optical network,” said John McGraw, CEO of LightLogic, Inc, recently acquired by Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) “With the simple addition of their amplifier, it is possible for us to offer our transponders to a significantly broader market.”Genoa Corp.