Agilent Technologies - High-Density Integrated Optical Multichannel Attenuators, Power Meters

These new attenuators and power meters provide high-speed attenuation and power setting, very fast power measurement, and USB, LAN and GPIB interfaces, and thus lead to increased throughput and operational efficiency to meet today's challenges in transceiver manufacturing and network integration test. Each of the attenuators feature power control functionality that allows test engineers to set the output power level of the attenuator instead of a known level of attenuation.

Agilent's N7751A and N7752A are next-generation hybrids that combine one or two variable single-mode fiber optical attenuators and two power meter channels in one unit.

The N7761A, N7762A and N7764A multichannel optical attenuators with granularities of one, two and four attenuator channels in one unit offer an excellent compromise between versatility and density.

All instruments can be controlled via LAN and USB, as well as GPIB for compatibility with existing equipment. An easy-to-use and intuitive Windows(r)-based graphical user interface and command compatibility to legacy Agilent attenuators speeds up the integration process. The variable optical attenuators also offer an industry-leading attenuation settling time of 20 ms and a selectable attenuation transition speed of 0.1 to 1000 dB/s.

The pressure to bring down test cost in manufacturing of transceiver modules and their subcomponents is enormous and requires new, more efficient test instruments, said Juergen Beck, general manager of Agilent's Digital Photonic Test business. Agilent's 77xx family establishes a new category of space-saving instrumentation. By facilitating parallel testing and increasing test speed, these new attenuators and power meters make substantial contributions to reduced cost of test.