Korea's "Make Everything Linked" Targets WDM-PONs

MEL (Make Everything Linked) is a start-up company founded in 2009 by former ETRI (the federally supported telecom research institute in Korea) researchers, announced the opening of an office in California and appointment of Dr. Donald P. Yu as its Chief Marketing Officer.



MEL's original technology is the wavelength reuse WDM-PON, where the optical signal modulated with downstream data is re-used so as to carry the upstream data through the Reflective Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (RSOA) in the CPE by a series of noble processes. As this scheme removes the Broadband Light Source (BLS), which constitutes a core element in competing WDM-PON technology offerings, it alleviates system complexity and operational burden inherent with the high-power dual BLS. With this RSOA-based "Reuse" scheme, MEL provides a simpler colorless DWDM architecture, offering significant cost-effectiveness and efficient wavelength resource utilization.



MEL's other key technology is the tunable external cavity laser (ECL) with waveguide Bragg gratings, based on Polymer and Silicon materials which support color-free OLT and ONU tunable transceivers (data rate up to 2.5Gbps 16 and 32-channels). An additional ECL technology is now commercially available, where the output wavelength is determined by a wavelength assigned patch cord (named as lambda-connector) while the SFP remains the same for up to 40 channels on ITU-T 100GHz spacing grid in either C-band or L-band.



Recently, MEL released hybrid PON products, which link WDM-PON as trunk with G-PON (or E-PON) as existing access network on the Physical Layer (OSI Layer 1). This provides an efficient, practical central office consolidation, offering opportunities for smooth migration of G-PON (or E-PON) to WDM-PON.



Dr. Yu is a former top executive at the Hanjin Information System and Telecommunication in Korea and now doing research at the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, University of California at Irvine as a visiting scholar. http://www.mels.co.krhttp://www.mel-wdmpon.com/