The name is hardly new to the sector, but the company severely retrenched in 2000 when it sold its optical components operations, which were mainly for in-house applications, to Cisco Systems and Corning.

A small, dedicated team was retained in Pirelli Labs that started work on new process technologies and some components, as was the group working on Fibre-to-the-Home gateways and CPE gear for Italian very high-speed broadband network operator FastWeb.

"We used part of the money we got from Corning and Cisco to create an R&D team and started the process and device development work in 2001. The aim was to develop a process based on nanoscale geometries to fabricate very highly integrated devices capable of delivering complex functionalities but which can be fabricated cost effectively," Pierluigi Franco, vice president of marketing at Pirelli's photonics business unit told CommsDesign.com during the ECOC exhibition here.

A dedicated facility near Milan is being readied for the process, which was developed as part of a collaboration with MIT's Microphotonics Center, established early 2002.

Samples of the C-band tunable lasers, aimed at 50GHz DWDM applications, will be available early next year, and according to Franco, "it is one of the few external cavity type lasers that can meet the demanding cost/performance targets of the industry."

The tunable optical ADMs were being demonstrated for the first time at ECOC, but Franco stressed several key potential customers, which includes leading Tier 1 TEMs such as Siemens, Alcatel, Nortel, Marconi and Lucent, have either shown interest in or are already evaluating the device. Volume production is expected to commence in the second half of next year, with the triplexers not far behind.

A marketing group has already been established which, Franco admits, is so far only targeting the European based TEMs. "The next goal, for early next year, is to establish a US sales and technical support operation, with channels in Japan and the Far East, traditionally a difficult area to operate, a longer term aim."

The component development efforts are being led by Giorgio Grasso, CEO of Pirelli Labs, who has returned to the company after a stint at Cisco following the sale of the components business.

Pirelli is now part owned by Telecom Italia, the country's incumbent PTT, and Franco readily admits this relationship is helping in developing components and subsystems that the operators are keen to see in their networks.

The company was also showing the latest version of its CWDM metro access system, dubbed the City 8, which is said to provide exceptional bandwidth allocation for transport systems.

Also being previewed was the radio-over-fiber transmission system being developed with Alcatel for 3G wireless infrastructure, which will be available early next year.

ROF allows the transmission of RF signals directly over fiber, and its deployment should make building W-CDMA third generation networks easier and cheaper.

Pirelli revealed that the company is using Altera's latest Stratix GX transceiver based FPGAs in both the baseband and the antenna unit to achieve the high speed link between the two parts.