The Open Eye Consortium (Open Eye MSA) has made its 100 Gbps per lane, long-reach, single-mode specification for 400G and 800G applications publicly available. Simultaneously, its has made complementary specifications for short-reach, multimode fiber applications available internally.
As is the case with the MSA’s previous specifications (see, for example, “Open Eye Consortium releases analog 50-Gbps LR1 and LR4 specifications” and “Open Eye Consortium completes specifications for 53G-per-lane multimode SR4, single-mode LR modules”), the two new specifications were developed to enable low-power, low-cost optical modules for hyperscale data center connectivity. These new specifications complement the Open Eye MSA’s previously released single and multi-mode specifications.
The publicly released 100 Gbps per lane single-mode specification targets 4x100 Gbps WDM modules for 3-km 400G-FR4-3 applications (400G-FR4-3). The 100 Gbps per lane multimode specification, currently available only to MSA members, pertains to 400-Gbps SR4-Lite and 800 Gbps SR8-Lite applications. The specification defines 50-m reach at an 850-nm VCSEL wavelength over OM4 fiber, as well as 30 m at 940 nm over OM4 and OM5 fiber.
The MSA also revealed the onset of work toward multilane, 100 Gbps per lane, 3-km parallel single-mode (PSM) fiber specifications. The MSA says its members welcome input from the end-user community on these new specifications.
The Open Eye MSA was founded in 2019 to develop specifications for PAM4-based data center modules leveraging analog clock and data recovery (CDR) based architectures as a lower-cost alternative to all-digital approaches (see “Open Eye MSA targets DSP-free PAM4 optical transceiver designs”).
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