Optical patch panel automation switch makes test engineers/system developers life easy by allowing them to configure optical patch panels from remote.  It allows automation of testbed connnections for various test configurations. The patch panel automation switches are L1 switches which means no latency and they come in different flavors as n(1xN) or MxN matrix configurations.

The patch panel switch allows users to configure, control and monitor the device from remote using any standard internet browser, a command line interface via telnet or SSH and SNMP v2c. It can be automated using TCL based application programming interface from any user application. These switches comes with Single Mode and Multimode versions. The number of ports are configurable. One of the popular model in this category is OS3012 which provides 100(1x2) duplex L1 optical switches in single enclosure.

OS3012 provides transparent optical layer connectivity which means it can be used with any protocols and speed as it  as opposed to O-E-O (optical electrical conversion - 2R/3R) devices available in the market. The transparent optical layer connectivity also allows unit under test to be tested directly without introducing another variable (ie, another conversion layer which could introduce significant latency).

For more details, download OS3012 document by clicking here