Mitsubishi Electric announces long-distance DWDM SFP transceiver
JULY 19, 2007 -- Mitsubishi Electric Corp. (search for Mitsubishi Electric) has developed a 2.5-Gbit/sec DWDM optical communications transceiver. The transceiver is capable of long-distance communications of up to 160 km over singlemode fiber, which the company claims is one of the highest in the industry, and it is compliant with the Small Form factor Pluggable (SFP) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA). Shipment of samples will begin on October 1, 2007.
Carriers have been rushing to expand metro area fiber-optic communications networks with recent increases in traffic due to the spread of ADSL, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), and other high-speed, large volume communication services to the residential market. To further increase the transmission volume of metro area optical transmission devices, manufacturers have been looking for a DWDM device that is small with low power consumption that can also transmit long distances.
Mitsubishi Electric started production of the SFP MSA-compliant MF-27WXE series DWDM optical communication transceiver in April of this year. With the new MF-27WXE series, Mitsubishi Electric claims to have developed two devices aimed at further increasing transmission distance to 160 km. With these two new products, Mitsubishi Electric says its lineup of 2.5-Gbit/sec, SFP MSA-compliant transceiver modules increases to six.
Historically, transmission distance of 2.5-Gbit/sec DWDM optical transmission transceiver modules has been limited to 120 km because of light waveform degradation from optical fiber wave dispersion properties affected by charp at time of modulation. By using a semiconductor laser developed in house that reduces charp as well as optimizing laser driver circuitry, Mitsubishi says it has developed a transceiver module capable of 160-km transmission.
The transceiver is capable of transmission speeds from 100 Mbits/sec to 2.7 Gbits/sec, just like previous devices. This simplifies constructing optical transmission systems of varying transmission speeds, such as Fast Ethernet, SONET STM-1/SDH OC-3, STM-4/OC-12, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, STM-16/OC-48, and OTN-1, say company representatives.
By including industry SFF8472 standard-compliant digital diagnostic monitoring (DDM) function, it is possible to monitor operating conditions of the module. This means a smaller, denser, lower cost module since an external monitoring circuit is no longer needed, says Mitsubishi.