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Bookham Inc of San Jose, CA, USA has introduced an ultra small, 5mm 40Gb/s Optical Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (ODQPSK) modulator chip, implemented via proprietary InP Mach Zehnder (MZ) technology. The company says it will combine this functionality with its tunable laser in new products designed for use in the 40Gb/s market.

The InP TL5000 Wideband Tunable iTLA has been proven for use in both 10 and 40Gb/s systems, says the company. Bookham is now combining the tunable laser with 40Gb/s MZ modulator chips from its UK 3" wafer fab.

"The capability to offer high bit rate performance with our fully qualified, proven tunable laser and InP MZ modulator is crucial as vendors continue to evolve towards 40Gb/s networks," said PLM director, Adam Price. "40Gb/s roll out is still hampered by prohibitive pricing as we see 40Gb/s systems costing in excess of 10 times a 10Gb/s system. With our vertically integrated InP core technology and strength in the 10Gb/s market, we are able to drive significant disruption in order to enable 40Gb/s systems to be adopted at a cost point that allows widespread adoption.

"The InP MZ platform has the flexibility to implement a range of modulation schemes at 40Gb/s, but it is our vision that ODQPSK, in which we have significant Intellectual Property, is the modulation format to allow the correct price positioning at 40Gb/s, and the scalability to 100Gb/s. ODQPSK also allows 40Gb/s to be deployed onto a 50GHz grid, and demonstrates higher resilience to polarisation mode dispersion," added Price.

"We have a proven InP capability to allow parallel modulator chip architectures to be implemented for the 40Gb/s approach and have produced an InP ODQPSK chip structure that is only 5mm long” Price concludes.

See related item:

Bookham demos zero-chirp fully qualified tunable SFF transponder

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