5 March 2014

Oclaro ramps production of dual-rate 100G CFP2 LR4 client-side pluggable transceiver

Oclaro Inc of San Jose, CA, USA (which provides components, modules and subsystems for optical communications) says that it is ramping up production capacity of its dual-rate 100G CFP2 LR4 transceiver to respond to the fast market adoption of the smaller form factor.

With approximately 50% smaller footprint and 30% lower power consumption compared with deployed 100G CFP LR4 transceivers, CFP2-compatible line-cards can immediately double the port density and bandwidth of a high-end core router or optical transport system, says the firm.

Oclaro says that its 100G CFP2 LR4 meets the needs of network operators wanting to simplify their network operation by collapsing multiple network layers while continuing to increase the available bandwidth. These new converged packet-optical networks require the most economical 100G client solutions to interconnect high-end routers to the optical infrastructure, adds the firm.

“Our solution is not only backward compatible with deployed CFP slots, but it also offers the flexibility of dual-rate operation to simplify our customers’ system and network design,” says Yoshikazu Era, general manager, Oclaro Japan Module Division. “Furthermore, our roadmap will not stop at CFP2 and we will continue to aggressively invest in laser, receiver and advanced packaging technology to further shrink the size and reduce power consumption of 100G client solutions,” he adds.

Oclaro says that, after it made the 100G CFP2 LR4 available to the market in 2013, several tier-1 customers re-designed their client interface line-cards to accommodate the new form factor and expedited product qualification. With most of the design slots reaching general availability in 2014, Oclaro is now expanding its investment in manufacturing and testing capacity to stay ahead of market demand.

Oclaro offers a CFP2 that is fully interoperable with existing CFP transceivers supporting both OTU-4 and 100GbE interfaces. The firm says that the support of ‘dual-rate operation’ (at both 103.125 and 111.810Gb/s) is critical to users demanding the flexibility to use the product both in native Ethernet and OTN transport environments (fully compliant with IEEE 100G Ethernet 802.3a 100GBASE-LR4 and ITU-T G.959.1 4I1-9D1F standards). As well as being fully compliant with MSA, IEEE and ITU-T specifications, Oclaro’s CFP2 is Telcordia qualified to GR-468. The CFP2 dual-rate operation is made possible by leveraging the efficiency of Oclaro’s indium phosphide (InP) distributed feedback laser (DFB) structure. The CFP2 also has an OIF CEI-28G-VSR standard-compliant board interface.

Expanding reach of CFP2 up to 40km

In addition, at the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC 2014) conference & exposition in San Francisco (11-13 March), Oclaro is unveiling a technical solution to further expand the reach of CFP2 up to 40km. By eliminating the power-hungry semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) used in previous IEEE 100GBASE-ER4 products, power consumption can be drastically reduced to allow for the transition to a smaller form factor such as CFP2, Oclaro says. With the broad adoption of 100G from core networking into access, there is demand for products that can reach beyond the LR4 10km standard. At OFC, Oclaro is demonstrating interoperability between a 100G CFP2 and a 25Gbps avalanche photodiode (APD) receive optical sub-assembly (ROSA) on a 40km transmission link.

Oclaro is planning to formally introduce this new extended-reach APD-based CFP2 in second-half 2014.

See related items:

Oclaro to demo 100G coherent CFP2 pluggable module at OFC

Tags: Oclaro CFP2

Visit: www.oclaro.com