Non-blocking tunable filter with flexible bandwidth for reconfigurable optical networks

摘要

A reconfigurable non-blocking Optical Add/Drop Module (OADM). The OADM is tunable to drop one or more target channels from an optical signal without interfering with any channels between a starting channel and the dropped channels. During tuning, all of the channels in the optical signal are expressed. In one embodiment of the OADM, two tunable optical filters are optically coupled in a cascade series such that one or more channels may be dropped by tuning both to the dropped channels. The optical filters are electronically coupled to a common controller that controls the operation of each of the tunable filters. The filters are tuned separately to reach the target dropped channels without interfering with any intermediate channels.