News Release ______

OFS AND FURUKAWA LAUNCH COHERENT MIXER WITH BUILT-IN

POLARIZATION MULTIPLEXER/DEMULTIPLEXER

OFC/ NFOEC 2011, Booth 2019, Los Angeles, California, March 8, 2011 – Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd.,

and the U.S. based OFS, Specialty Photonics Division, today announced a coherent mixer with built-in

polarization multiplexer/demultiplexer for ultra-high bit rate 100-Gbps digital coherent transmission. The

coherent mixer, a key component required at the signal receiver in the optical digital coherent scheme, is

integrated with a polarization multiplexer/demultiplexer resulting in a compact device. This helps reduce

costs and provides simplification, high reliability, small form factor, and elimination of characteristics

degradation at the connected part. Furukawa Electric plans to begin volume production in the 3

Quarter

2011. The product will be exhibited at OFC/NFOEC 2011, the world's largest international

conference/exhibition on telecommunications.

Background

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the volume network infrastructure traffic, due to

several enterprise and consumer market trends including cloud computing, data centers, video on demand

(VoD), voice over IP (VoIP), video distribution, ubiquity of smartphones, popularity of social networks and

peer to peer applications. As a result, the access, metro and long-haul network infrastructure will be

required to plan and expand for ever increasing network capacity demand.

If the ultra-high bit rate optical transmission of 100 Gbps is implemented based on the conventional scheme

of binary intensity modulation where optical intensity is ON/OFF keyed, it is impossible to transmit optical

signals reliably because the signals are heavily impacted by degradation and noise over the transmission

line. In May 2010, the Optical Interconnecting Forum (OIF)

Note 1

decided to adopt the digital coherent

scheme, which uses light phase or state of the lightwave in place of light intensity or ON/OFF keying. This

makes transmission much more robust against signal degradation and unaffected by noise, along with the

multilevel modulation scheme which enables suppression of net transmission speed. This scheme has

already been employed in parts of Europe and is expected to be deployed full-scale in North America in

2012.

In the digital coherent scheme, enhanced ultra-high speed optical transmission can be realized by using two

orthogonally polarized lightwaves to propagate the phase-modulated signals. A polarization

multiplexer/demultiplexer and a coherent mixer (or optical interference device) are required at the signal

receiver in such a scheme.

Furukawa Electric has developed a single compact device that integrates a polarization

multiplexer/demultiplexer, which has a high-polarization extinction ratio, with a coherent mixer, which has

excellent loss of uniformity. This builds upon Furukawa technology and vast experience in planar lightwave

circuit (PLC), optical splitters and athermal waveguide gratings (AWGs) with high reliability and superior

characteristics. The product thus combines the advantages of PLC stabilized characteristics reproducibility

with the skew minimization characteristics of a coherent mixer.

Product Specifications

• High reliability having a proven track record in splitters and athermal AWGs

• Low cost

• Small size

• Excellent loss uniformity (1 dB or better)

• Low skew (typically 1 ps or lower)

• High polarization extinction ratio (18 dB or higher)

Note 1: OIF; The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) promotes the development and deployment of

interoperable networking solutions and services through the creation of Implementation Agreements (IAs)

for optical networking products, network processing elements, and component technologies.