The Open Eye Consortium (Open Eye MSA), dedicated to creating specifications for high-speed PAM4 optical transceivers without the need for a DSP, has unveiled specifications for a pair of transceiver designs leveraging 53-Gbps lanes. The SR4 specifications describe a module for 100-m multimode fiber applications, while the LR specs target 10-km single-mode fiber requirements.
The specifications are applicable to 50G SFP, 100G DSFP, 100G SFP-DD, 200G QSFP, 400G QSFP-DD, and 400G OSFP modules, says the MSA. The specifications should prove particularly popular for 53-Gbps SFP28 LR and 200-Gbps QSFP SR implementations for 5G mobile, enterprise, and data center network applications, the Open Eye MSA states. The new specifications follow the MSA’s previously released 200-Gbps FR4 specification (see "Open Eye Consortium releases PAM4 53-Gbps single-mode transceiver module specification").
Additional information about the specifications is available at https://www.openeye-msa.org/. A whitepaper on the MSA’s work is also available online. Information about a pair of webinars also can be found on the MSA’s website.
The Open Eye MSA launched in May 2019 with the goal of creating specifications for PAM4 optical transceivers based on optimized analog clock and data recovery (CDR) based architectures rather than the those based on DSPs (see “Open Eye MSA targets DSP-free PAM4 optical transceiver designs”). The analog CDR approach promises lower cost, complexity, and power, the members believe. In announcing the new specifications, the MSA also revealed that Credo Semiconductor, Fuji Xerox, and Lumentum have joined as contributing members.
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