San Jose, Calif., October 14, 2002 – CALIENT Technologies, a leading global provider of intelligent, photonic switching systems, announces that R&D Magazine has selected the CALIENT DiamondWave™ switch as one of 100 most technologically significant new products for 2002. The award will be presented at the 40th Anniversary R&D 100 Awards banquet at the Navy Pier in Chicago this Wednesday.

R&D Magazine’s international competition is judged by a panel of 100 independent industry experts. Past R&D 100 Award recipients have included technologies as diverse and impactful as antilock brakes, femtosecond lasers, CAD tools for photonics, DNA analysis and cancer treatment tools, the fax machine, and HDTV.

CALIENT Technologies’ DiamondWave is an advanced, field-proven photonic switch for telecom networks. It was selected because it is the first system of its kind to successfully leverage single-crystal silicon 3D MEMS (Micro-ElectroMechanical Switch) hardware, embedded software intelligence, multi-vendor interoperability to support open optical networks, and flexible interfaces to integrate with deployed telecom switches.

The DiamondWave switch is the product of seven years’ development in bulk MEMS mirrors, plasma micromachining, high-yield VLSI manufacturing, collimator integration and rapid, automated system testing. The company has 60+ patents approved and pending, and recently announced new breakthroughs in assembly, packaging and test which enabled dramatic reductions in system pricing to carriers and entry-level configurations for smaller-capacity switching nodes.

In contrast to traditional electronic switches, with limits of hundreds of Gigabit capacity, the DiamondWave switch can carry 5 Terabits of data on all 256 ports, for a total of 1 Petabit capacity.

CALIENT’s DiamondWave is a fully photonic switching system, i.e., it provides connections where the data path is purely photonic, with no electrical components or conversions. The switch dynamically and rapidly sets up and switches trunk interconnection based on interaction with other autonomous network equipment, and it is the first production equipment to do so using a newly standardized signaling protocol suite called Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching. The system is protocol-independent, i.e., the switch does not need to be replaced as protocols change. DiamondWave is also bit rate-independent, and works at existing (10 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s) as well as at future bit rates (40 Gbit/s to 160 Gbit/s).

CALIENT uses 3D MEMS technology to make its ultra-dense switch. The switch is a non-blocking 256-port design, meaning that any of the 256 input ports can be connected to any of the 256 output ports, resulting in 65,000 possible switch states. This is accomplished with a mirror array that is approximately 1 cm on a side. Such incredibly high density is not possible with alternative technologies, such as liquid crystals or LiNbO3.

CALIENT’s co-authorship and consensus building among its peers for the Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) protocol suite also contributed to the migration of optical networking from closed and proprietary architectures to open, multi-vendor interoperable networks. Implementation of GMPLS in optical networks greatly enhances the speed and flexibility of wavelength provisioning, and the efficient use of routers to dynamically restore connections, perform load balancing and optimize restoration path performance.

About CALIENT Technologies
CALIENT Technologies is a leading provider of intelligent, photonic switching systems and software that help service providers scale their networks for explosive bandwidth demands and deliver new wavelength services. CALIENT’s DiamondWave™ switching system and GMPLS-powered networking innovations provide a seamless, ‘opto-electronic-to-photonic’ migration path that is non-disruptive to legacy operations, highly cost-effective, and an enabler to revenue-generating optical services. CALIENT is shipping its DiamondWave 256 and 128 systems to carrier networks worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. Additional engineering and manufacturing operations are located in Santa Barbara, California, while MEMS design and fabrication operations are located in Ithaca, New York. For additional information about CALIENT, visit www.calient.net.

CALIENT Technologies, the CALIENT Technologies logo, and DiamondWave are trademarks of CALIENT Technologies, Inc.

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