POLATIS TECHNOLOGY - DirectLight® Beam-Steering All-Optical Switch

Polatis' highly reliable piezoelectric Directlight® beam-steering technology sets the industry standard for lowest optical loss and highest performance. With more than a billion port-hours accumulated on deployed units, the Polatis technology platform delivers a broad range of class-leading all-optical matrix switch products into demanding applications. At the core of Polatis optical switches is our patented DirectLight beam-steering technology that makes connections using compact piezoelectric actuators to align collimated beams of light from opposing arrays of input and output fibers with minimal loss, distortion or interference between paths. Alignment is maintained using feedback from integrated position sensors to ensure connection stability over time, temperature and external disturbances. Switching occurs completely independently of the power level, color or direction of light on the path, enabling pre-provisioning of dark fiber and avoiding concatenation of switching delays across mesh or multi-stage switched optical networks. Polatis optical switches are fully non-blocking and available in sizes from 8x8 to 384x384.

Polatis Technology Highlights

• Modular fabric scalable from 4x4 to 384x384
• Ultra-low insertion loss and superior optical specifications
• Able to make and hold dark fiber connections
• Format and bit-rate agnostic up to 100Gbs and beyond
• Fast connection switching speed
• Low power usage
• Full-featured carrier-class user interfaces
• High density compact form factor
• Optional optical power monitoring and Variable Optical Attenuation (VOA) on every connection