September 3, 2004 Ottawa, Canada -- Bookham Technology plc will unveil at ECOC what it describes as the industry's first integrated offering for optical receiver overload protection that meets ITU and IEEE standards GR-253-CORE and G.959.1. The company claims its integrated ATV10GC receiver is one-quarter of the size and has half the electrical power consumption and about half the cost of competing discrete devices. The device is designed for use by in the 300-pin transponder package.
Bookham says the new receiver is currently the only device of its kind available in the surface mount coplanar MSA form factor, with an integrated MEMS variable optical attenuator (VOA) to control the optical power reaching the avalanche photodiode (APD) optical receiver.
"Integration is the key because it gives you a combination of size and power consumption benefits that cannot be achieved by other means," says Roger Harley, Bookham's marketing director for discrete active components. "It provides the receiver with the ability to withstand high optical power levels, which has become absolutely crucial to system vendors now, given the ITU and IEEE standards for APD protection."
The ATV10GC receiver is designed to withstand +10-dBm overload, a +5-dBm margin over the ITU requirement. The VOA also allows the optical signal to be adjusted dynamically to enable the receiver to always operate within its optimum range.
The ATV10GC receiver consists of an APD, a low-noise preamplifier, a MEMS VOA (on which patents are applied), and a negative temperature co-efficient (NTC) thermistor in a hermetic coplanar package with a singlemode fiber pigtail. Differential outputs are provided to improve noise rejection for enhanced sensitivity. The receiver is optimized for use in 10-Gbit/sec DWDM metro or regional metro applications -- either as a discrete device or within a transponder -- using non-return-to-zero (NRZ) modulation, with or without forward error correction (FEC), at data rates of up to 10.7 Gbits/sec.
The product is now available in sample quantities, with high-volume shipments beginning in January 2005. Telcordia GR-468-CORE qualification is underway, and the MEMS die, APD die, and transimpedance amplifier die are already fully qualified.