December 18, 2001--Blaze Network Products (Dublin, CA), developer of 10-Gigabit Ethernet optical modules, today announced first shipments of 10GBASE-LX4 compliant transceivers in the XENPAK MSA pluggable form factor.
The Flamethrower-XGLX4 is said by Blaze to exceed distance objectives set by IEEE 802.3ae for 10-Gigabit Ethernet enterprise applications. The device can transmit over multimode or single mode fiber. Using XAUI as the electrical interface, the four-channel design of the Flamethrower device eliminates the need for additional internal SERDES chips required by serial solutions to operate within 10-Gigabit Ethernet applications.
The modules adhere to the current revision of the IEEE 802.3ae 10GBASE-XGLX4 standard. In addition to Blaze, Molex and Pine Photonics will also supply the product. In September the companies completed vendor-to-vendor testing to ensure that interoperability requirements of the IEEE specification were met (see Lightwave, November 2001�Serial 850-nm passes 10-GbE interoperability testing).