Finisar building flexible-grid ROADM line card for Cisco

Finisar (NASDAQ:FNSR) and Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) are showing off at ECOC the capabilities of a 2x1x17 flexible-grid ROADM line card the former is building for the latter. The two-slot line card will feature Finisar’s Flexgrid Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS) and high-speed parallel scanning Flexgrid Optical Channel Monitor (OCM).

The two companies are using a private meeting room in the Finisar booth to demo the line card’s expected performance to their respective customers. The demo includes the card’s ability to accommodate superchannels by adapting channel bandwidth. The ROADM line card is designed to work via a route-and-select architecture.

Finisar Vice President of Marketing Rafik Ward admitted the card isn’t quite ready for fielding. He declined to reveal when development would be sufficiently advanced to meet this goal, citing concerns about releasing Cisco product availability information. While Cisco and Finisar are conducting joint demonstrations at the Finisar booth, the Cisco rep usually steps away when Finisar wants to impress other systems houses. Finisar was hosting just such a delegation in the demo room when Lightwave visited, so Cisco input on the availability of this functionality wasn’t available. However, it appears that Cisco plans to be able to ship the line card by the second half of next year, according to other sources who have spoken to Cisco at the show.

Finisar touts the ROADM card as an example of its ability to deliver products at the line card level. Ward said the company expects there to be demand for both full flexible-grid ROADM line cards as well as just the subsystem components for in-house development, and the company expects to be positioned to meet both preferences.

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