23 March 2015

Source Photonics announces production ramp and general availability of 100G QSFP28 transceiver

Optical communication product maker Source Photonics Inc of West Hills, CA, USA has announced volume shipments of its 100G QSFP28 LR4 and LR4 Lite products from its expanded manufacturing facilities.

Source Photonics says that, since demonstrating the products at OFC 2014 in San Francisco, it has made extensive investments in its wafer fab and fully automated manufacturing lines for 100G transmitter and receiver optical subassemblies (TOSAs and ROSAs).

In parallel to the roll-out of the TOSA and ROSA manufacturing lines, the firm has expanded matching 100G capacity in its transceiver module assembly & test line to support aggressive volumes projected by industry analysts. "Our current forecast reflects the increased urgency of hyper-scale data-center builders to ramp 100GbE in their switching fabrics," comments Dale Murray, principal analyst for LightCounting Market Research. "This market wants to go directly to the QSFP28 form factor," he adds. 

The QSFP28 form factor represents the most compact 100G interfaces available, and enables data-center and network operators to achieve the maximum front-plate density. Two versions of the transceivers now shipping in volume are available: A 100GBase-LR4-compliant product and a 2km-reach version targeted at high-density data-center applications.

"The market interest in our small-form-factor 100G products has been tremendous," says Source Photonics' chief technology officer Mark Heimbuch. "Featuring a typical power consumption of less than 3W including full duplex CDR [clock & data recovery] for a wide range of use cases, it is interoperable with standard IEEE LR4 larger form-factor 100G optics," he adds. "Combined with our manufacturing investments, we are very excited to be able to support our lead tier-1 customers' ramp to volume." 

Source Photonics is hosting a live demonstration of the QSFP28 module operating in an Arista 7280SE-68 Top-of-Rack switch in booth 2301 at the Optical Fiber Conference conference & exposition (OFC 2015) in Los Angeles (24-26 March).

In addition to the 100G QSFP28 LR4 and LR4 Lite, Source Photonics is also shipping the 100G CFP4 LR4 (designed for router and transport systems and supporting multi-rate Ethernet and OTU4 applications) from the same manufacturing line.

See related items:

Source Photonics demos 100G-LR4 interoperability between QSFP28 module and new CFP4 module

Source Photonics introduces first 100G LR4 transceiver in QSFP28 form factor

Tags: Source Photonics QSFP28

Visit: www.sourcephotonics.com

Visit: www.ofcconference.org