WaveSmart Fiber Splitters

Product Details

Clearfield^® provides Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC) and Fused Biconic Taper (FBT) Splitters in a variety of optical component packages for the network and application need allowing carriers the ability to provide uniform fully passive signal splitting to multiple premises.

Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC or Planar)

A light circuit on an ‘optical chip’ is mounted on a carrier and fibers, usually in ribbon form, are bonded to the edges of the chip. The assembly is encapsulated in a protective enclosure. PLC devices support direct split counts up to 64. In planar fabrication technology, devices are made using ion-exchange or photo-lithography techniques that replicate solid-state circuit methods. Ultimately, the per-unit cost for the expected high volumes will become advantageous for planar technology, especially for higher port devices. A difficult manufacturing problem involves a low-loss method for attaching the optical fibers to the chip and then passing the market’s qualification and reliability requirements.

Fused Biconic Taper (FBT)

Two or more fibers are twisted together, heated and drawn to bring the optical cores into near contact. The combined fibers are mounted on a low-expansion carrier and encapsulated in a low expansion tube. FBT devices allow direct splitting up to 32 ways. Higher split counts are achieved by splicing multiple devices to form multi-stage, concatenated splitters. Concatenated splitters are also called tree splitters. The fused biconic tapered technology directly bonds or melts the fibers together so that the final splitter can be mounted in small diameter (approximately 3-millimeter) stainless-steel tubes. This technology produces small, low-cost, high-performance devices. A tough fabrication obstacle involves the small and delicate final coupling region. However, when properly mounted and packaged, these devices meet long-term stability and reliability requirements.

Packaging Options

Clearview Cassette

Cassettes can be scaled from multiple 1 x 2 splitters up to a 1 x 64 split. The Clearview Cassette then populates any “Clearview Multiplied” product across the network, including inside plant panels, outside plant cabinets, and access network products, such as pedestals.

Clearview xPAK

A compact and convenient means by which to land 1 x 2 up to 1 x 8 splits as a stand-alone device or as part of Clearfield’s “Clearview Landed” program, integrating into a Clearfield designed enclosure or many industry-leading enclosures from the provider of your choosing.

Pizza Box

1RU rack mountable (19” or 23”) product with front female adapters. This solution may be suitable if a single optical component is needed in a frame and no future growth will be needed. Since the module has mounting ears, no separate chassis is needed for this solution. The optical component is housed within the rack mountable box.

LGX

Low-density cassettes that are widely used in the industry. In some cases, when an LGX chassis is already in place, it may be necessary to continue using this size splitter module. When planning a new project, using the Clearview Cassette format is preferable due to the increased capacity and flexibility of the FieldSmart design.

Features & Benefits

Integrity

• Terminations are designed and tested to Telcordia GR-326
• Supports industry standard SC and LC singlemode and multimode connectors
• 100% performance tested for insertion loss, return loss and final mechanical inspect

Protection

• Ruggedized, secure packaging
• Non-removable adapter plates

Access

• Front and rear access to panel

Investment

• FieldSmart^® Optical Components offer an economical, dense and user-friendly solution for deploying splitters or WDMs in a central office design
• Virtually any combination of split ratios and number of components can be achieved in one of the four Clearview Cassette sizes
• Clearfield supports legacy splitter deployments by offering optical components in LGX footprint
• 1 RU optical components available for smaller, limited deployments
• Environmentally stable, high isolation, low insertion loss
• Compliant to Telcordia GR-1221 and GR-1209