Fujitsu Semiconductor Europe (FSEU), which was among the first to offer the high-speed analog-to-digial converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) necessary for coherent transmission of optical signals (see "Fujitsu launches ADC technology for 100G"), will display next week the first results of its converter work in 28-nm processes at OFC/NFOEC in Anaheim, CA.

At the show, FSEU will display an ADC that supports sampling rates from 55-70 GSa/s with scalable analog bandwidth. The company says it has a companion DAC that serves the same rates that will follow “shortly.” Meanwhile, the company also has additional 28-nm CMOS converters in the pipeline for release this year that will support sampling rates ranging from 28 to greater than 90 GSa/s.

The converters can be used in several channel-count configurations, and all variants will be 8-bit and scale down in power based on sampling rate, according to the company. The use of 28-nm processes will lower the cost and improve the efficiency of the devices versus chips made from older CMOS processes, making the the semiconductors particularly suitable for price-sensitive metro applications as well as long-haul fiber-optic networks, FSEU says. The company also has its eye on products that support inter- and intra-data center optical links for 100-Gbps Ethernet over a few hundred meters to interconnect across a PCB or a backplane channel.

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