EXFO Adds To Optical Modulation Analyzer

EXFO has added several new analysis tools to its PSO-200 Optical Modulation Analyzer, providing flexibility to manufacturers looking to adapt their testing procedures to any future compliance procedures and allowing performance of phase-modulated transmitters such as DP-QPSK to be established independently of the receiver.

With 40G and 100G DP-QPSK transmitters now commercially available, manufacturers are facing several challenges when transferring those products from R&D to production, among which are the absence of compliance criteria and the standardized procedures against which to test. To address these challenges, the PSO-200 offers several new features, including the unique time-resolved error vector magnitude (EVM) analysis, developed by EXFO to allow fast and precise identification of transmitter impairments. The optical modulation analyzer also provides bit-error-rate (BER) and symbol-error-rate (SER) computation in a powerful gearbox that allows users to provide the patterns and sequences used in their transmitter in order to get precise mapping of errors, ITU-T and IEEE-based compliance mask tests for OOK modulation formats, as well as constellation and time-resolved EVM masks for phase-modulated signals.

In addition, the PSO-200 also comes with an optional external local oscillator input to support the requirements for homodyne characterization. This can prove to be very useful when testing transmitters using lasers with larger linewidth such as 40G DQPSK modules with coherent instruments like the PSO-200.