Bookham boosts 2.7-Gbit/sec DWDM SFP transceiver to 180-km reach

March 9, 2006 Anaheim, CA -- At this week's OFC/NFOEC 2006, Bookham has announced what it calls greatly increased reaches for its DWDM SFP pluggable optical transceiver. The company says its upgraded IGP-28111 transceiver achieves transmission reaches of 180 km at 2.7 Gbit/sec on uncompensated singlemode fiber.

At 1.25-, 3.125-, and 4.25-Gbit/sec, the company says that reaches of 500-, 120-, and 75-km respectively have been demonstrated with the transceiver. The company says the transceiver universally supports the requirements of high performance SFP applications, providing TDM, CWDM, and DWDM capability.

"This is a significant development for optical transmission systems," contends Richard Baldey, DWDM transceiver product line manager at Bookham. "The performance improvement comes with no additional cost to customers, and, for the first time, enables them to procure a single part number that can cover all the reaches from 80 to 180-km in a single highly-cost-effective product. It extends the system operating envelope and margins, and allows DWDM capability, giving increased bandwidth, which can be applied cost-effectively to a wider range of applications in the metro access and core, IP over DWDM, enterprise, and triple-play voice, data, and video spaces."

The company says its IGP-28111 transceiver allows the use of DWDM transmission protocols over significantly greater link lengths than has been possible before, with the convenience and small size of the pluggable SFP platform. The upgraded IGP-28111 is designed to accept DWDM SONET/SDH traffic (with or without FEC) for 180-km links with a dispersion penalty of less than 2 dB, and is available for both C- and L-band wavelengths.

In an example of increased reach, the company says the transceiver has demonstrated excellent high-margin performance at Gigabit Ethernet data rates over fiber spans well in excess of 500-km. As these long-reach applications require optical amplification, and hence low optical signal-to-noise ratios (OSNRs), the company says it has performed extensive evaluations and demonstrated receiver sensitivity of better than -28 dBm over 200-km reach at 16-dB OSNR.

The company says the IGP-28111 has reached interim Telcordia qualification to GR-468-CORE and is already in production, and has been evaluated and used by a number of customers. CWDM-wavelength versions of the transceiver in the 1470�1610-nm range are planned to enable extension of CWDM link lengths.

The IGP-28111 is one of a series of products on display at Bookham's booth #3013 at OFC/NFOEC 2006.