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News

17 September 2007

 

First hot-swappable 10Gb/s tunable transceiver for DWDM

At this week’s European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2007) in Berlin, Germany, Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Electric Corp is unveiling what it claims is the world’s first hot-swappable 10Gb/s optical transceiver capable of tuning over the whole C-band (1530-1560nm) dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) range.

The new MF-10KWXF series 10Gb/s transceiver allows multi-rate operation at date rates of 9.95-11.1Gb/s for SONET/SDH and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks, and complies with the XFP-E (extended) 10Gb/s small form-factor pluggable multi-source agreement (MSA).

In October 2006, Mitsubishi Electric commercialized the XFP-E MSA-compliant MF-10KWXB series optical transceiver for DWDM, which used a fixed frequency. But, says the firm, with increased Internet traffic in recent years, service providers are rushing to expand the transmission volume of optical communications networks, so there is increasing demand for a DWDM system that can handle 64 or 128 wavelengths in a single optical fiber. The need for a tunable optical interface to operate this using pluggable transceiver is increasing.

So, in contrast to the MF-10KWXB, the new MF-10KWXF series is the first hot-swappable optical transceiver that can be set to any C-band DWDM grid frequency at the user’s discretion by mounting a tunable laser with a low-power-consumption semiconductor modulator (rather than a lithium niobate modulator) in the transceiver module.

Previous tunable DWDM 10Gb/s transceivers were unable to hot swap because they were connected to the substrate with a 300-pin electric connector, so users had to physically remove and insert optical transceiver motherboards, and optical interface maintenance was necessary, which made integrating multiple ports on one board impossible. The MF-10KWXF series is pluggable for multiple ports by edge connecting using XFI (XFP MSA 4.5 compliant) electric connection conditions.

By complying with the XFP-E MSA and considering maintenance design by using the XFI interface, the transceiver can be used with no changes to the user board even when future XFP frequency tuner DWDM optical communications transceivers are developed.

With a compact size of 78mm x 48mm x 12.6mm and low power consumption of 7W (maximum), the MF-10KWXF is 50% smaller and uses 40% less energy compared to previous models, the firm claims. Also, by using XFI edge connecting and receptacle design, the occupied substrate surface area is reduced by 70% compared to models using a 300-pin transponder. Combining this with multiple porting will greatly improve mounting density, reckons Mitsubishi Electric.

See related items:

Pirelli adds full L-band coverage to DWDM tunable range, and launches 120km XFP optical transceiver

JDSU demos tunable ‘transmitter-on-a-chip’ PIC technology

Tunable laser manufacturer Syntune raises $7.1m in second-round funding

Visit: http://global.mitsubishielectric.com