September 22, 2009[12:45 PM CET] First, some leftovers from yesterday. JDSU European Director Sales Sinclair Vass expanded on the company's tunability announcement by saying that the company will sell the ITLA and even the TOSA that enable their tunable XFP, but only to "select people" -- mostly those that would use them in non-telecom applications. The tunable XFP is aimed first at replacing fixed-wavelength XFPs, with unseating 300-pin transceivers next. A tunable SFP remains in the works. Sinclair also offered his opinions on coherent technology at 40G as well as the company's strategy for coming up with the coverter, DSP, and algorithms for coherent detection, which I hope to include in a separate story on 100G strategies (so stay tuned)...Speaking this morning, Javed Patel, CEO of Sierra Monolithics, is confident in his company's competitive position at 100G. When it comes to the receiver electronics, he sees two camps -- all CMOS (such as Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe is pursuing) and SiGe for the front end and CMOS for the rest, which is what his company is doing in its partnership with IBM. He expects to be working mainly with systems companies rather than transceiver vendors because the first generation of coherent receivers will by ASIC based -- and the ASICs will come from the systems houses....
[3:35 PM CET] And now, a round up of what's new here in test. The major thrust, not surprisingly, is in 40G/100G test capabilities. Agilent has expanded the capabilities of its optical modulation analyzer by including BER functionality. The feature is designed to complement other BER measurements to enable users to not only detect the fact that errors occur, but what part of the system is causing them...EXFO, meanwhile, is leveraging its Picosolve acquisition to offer its own optical modulation analyzer as competition. Peter Andrekson, who joined EXFO upon the acquistion and heads the company's activities in its Swedish facilities (as well as teaching at the Chalmers University of Technology), touts the fact that the PSO-200 is based on an all-optical sampling system (versus the real-time, electrically based approaches of companies like Agilent and Optametra). Among other benefits, the all-optical approach enables the testing of higher-speed and/or more complex modulation approaches. So, for example, the instrument is already able to handle 400-Gbps DQPSK as well as 16QAM...Anritsu is demonstrating that it has increased the performance of its MP1800A Signal Quality Analyzer Series. The unit now offers signal generation and analysis up to 56 Gbps. Mux/demux options enable testing of 100G applications as well...In other test applications, mdi says that Optus, SingTel's division in Australia, has decided to deploy the company's eyeD 360 network monitor. The company has also developed a version of the eyeD for lab applications...Luna Technologies is showing off its OVA 5000 Optical Vector Analyzer, introduced earlier this month.
