Acacia Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:ACIA) has revealed that it has discovered and addressed what it described as "a quality issue" that affected an unspecified percentage of the approximately 1,300 AC400 FLEX optical transceivers and 5,000 CFP optical modules manufactured at one of its three contract manufacturers over a period of approximately four months. Acacia says it is working with customers who received the defective modules to remedy any issues they may face as a result.
The company thinks the problems revolve around a circuit board cleaning process used at the unidentified contract manufacturer during the four months in question. The process is no longer in use, and Acacia doesn't believe optical modules currently being produced at the facility suffer from the issue.
Acacia does not yet have an estimate for the cost of the remediation process or how the problem could affect its near-term manufacturing capacity.
The hiccough potentially opens the door for competitors looking to eat into Acacia's market share. For example, NeoPhotonics announced a coherent CFP optical module at OFC 2017 (see "NeoPhotonics samples ClearLight CFP-DCO coherent optical transceiver"). Meanwhile, Ciena announced at the same event that it will supply its WaveLogic Ai coherent silicon to a trio of vendors, who plan to produce a 5x7-inch 400-Gbps optical transceiver similar to the AC400 (see "Ciena to license WaveLogic Ai coherent DSP to optical module vendors"), with at least one expecting to sample their modules by the end of this year.
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