Optical interleaver

An optical interleaver is a 3-port passive fiber-optic device that is used to combine two sets of dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) channels (odd and even channels) into a composite signal stream in an interleaving way. For example, optical interleaver takes two multiplexed signals with 100 GHz spacing and interleaves them, creating a denser DWDM signal with channels spaced 50 GHz apart. The process can be repeated, creating even denser composite signals with 25 GHz or 12.5 GHz spacing. An optical interleaver is a 3-port passive fiber-optic device that is used to combine two sets of dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) channels (odd and even channels) into a composite signal stream in an interleaving way. For example, optical interleaver takes two multiplexed signals with 100 GHz spacing and interleaves them, creating a denser DWDM signal with channels spaced 50 GHz apart. The process can be repeated, creating even denser composite signals with 25 GHz or 12.5 GHz spacing. The device can be used in a reverse direction, forming an optical deinterleaver that separates a denser DWDM signal into odd channels and even channels. See schematic diagram.