Oclaro, Inc. (NASDAQ: OCLR) has announced availability of what the company asserts is the first fully tunable SFP+ industrial temperature range (TSFP+ I-temp) transceiver. The optical transceiver represents a breakthrough for cable companies that deploy the latest DOCSIS 3.1 standard, pushing fiber installation deeper into the HFC network to reach next-generation Remote PHY nodes, the company says.
Cable operators around the world are deploying new technology, including DOCSIS 3.1, to increase the capacity of their networks to keep pace with competition. In the U.S. alone, there are over 50 million homes served by MSOs, and as many as 1 million new nodes, making deployment of 10G full-duplex per node over the next 4 to 5 years challenging (see "CableLabs Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 specification enables HFC symmetrical 10-Gbps broadband"). According to Oclaro, deployment is only possible with fully tunable DWDMlasers and similar products that are easy to install, configure, and monitor.
The transceiver is Oclaro's latest product to include I-temp, and is vertically integrated using the company's in-house integrated laser Mach-Zehnder (ILMZ) chip and custom-designed TOSA and ROSA technology. Oclaro says the ILMZ chip'smaterial composition and custom tuning of thermal and electronic control components give the TSFP+ I-temp the ability to operate in -40C to 85C environments.
Along with Oclaro's 10G TSFP+ C-temp and E-temp, the TSFP+ I-temp has begun shipping, and is now available for volume production orders. The company has been working in the area of high-temperature SFP+ optical transceivers for several years (see, for example, "Oclaro shows high-temperature operation of 10G tunable SFP+ module" from 2014).
"Fully tunable DWDM laser technology is critical to enable large-scale fiber deep deployment while minimizing operations cost and eliminating human errors," said Yves LeMaitre, Oclaro's chief strategy officer. "With tunable lasers capable of operating from -40 to 85 degrees C, we believe the days of analog optics or fixed WDM lasers are counted. Once you start using tunable products, the operational benefits such as automatic configuration and reduced sparing are just too great to go back to legacy optics."
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