100 Gigabit Ethernet Optical Transceiver Solution

100G Ethernet Develops Rapidly
With the increasing demands of higher speed and greater bandwidth, more and more people are looking forward to the coming of 100G Ethernet. In fact, with the rapid development in these few years, 100G Ethernet is getting closer to us. According to the latest report from Infonetics, 100G accounts for over half of all bandwidth deployed in carrier networks in 2014, and will grow rapidly through 2018. As you can see from the diagram below, in 2014, the 100G is on par with the 10G, but in 2016, it exceeds the 10G and grow rapidly in 2018.

The explosive growth in mobile data traffic, data centers, and cloud services are the catalysts behind significant traction of 100G deployments in the Core and Long Haul networks. Service providers and carriers are accelerating the deployment of 100G but also looking carefully to manage their CAPEX and OPEX effectively. Many company, such as Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Brocade, and Juniper Networks have introduced 100G equipment. By 2015, higher-speed Ethernet will have about a 25% share of network equipment ports, according to Infonetics Research.

Development of 100G Ethernet Optical Transceiver
To build and support the 100G Ethernet, usually needs a variety of technologies and devices. The 100G transceiver is one of the essential one, because fiber connectivity in higher-speed active equipment is being condensed and simplified with plug-and-play, hot-swap transceiver miniaturization. As we know, 1G and 10G networks commonly utilize the GBIC (Gigabit interface converter) or SFP (small form-factor pluggable ), while for 8G Fibre Channel SAN (Storage Area Network) and OTU2, as well as some 10G, the transceiver is the SFP+ (small form-factor pluggable plus). The transceiver develops today, there are QSFP (quad small form-factor pluggable), CFP and CXP (100G form-factor pluggable) respectively for 40G and 100G active equipment. In addition, MPO/MTP is the designated interface for multimode 40/100G, and it’s backward compatible with legacy 1G/10G applications as well. Its small, high-density form factor is ideal with higher-speed Ethernet equipment. We may be familiar with the transceivers for 1G, 8G, 10G and 40G as we often mention. Thus, we will mainly introduce the 100G transceivers in the next content.

Multipurpose CFP Transceiver

The CFP Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) defines hot-pluggable optical transceiver form factors to enable 40Gbps and 100Gbps applications, including next-generation High Speed Ethernet (40GbE and 100GbE). CFP supports both single-mode and multi-mode fiber and a variety of data rates, protocols, and link lengths, including all the physical media-dependent (PMD) interfaces encompassed in the IEEE 802.3ba standard. At 40GbE, target optical interfaces include the 40GBase-SR4 for 100 meters (m) and the 40GBase-LR4 for 10 kilometers (km). There are three PMDs for 100 GbE: 100GBASE-SR10 for 100 m, 100GBASE-LR4 for 10 km, and 100GBASE-ER4 for 40 km. CFP was designed after the Small Form-factor Pluggable transceiver (SFP) interface, but is significantly larger to support 100Gbps. The electrical connection of a CFP uses 10 x 10Gbps lanes in each direction (RX, TX). The optical connection can support both 10 x 10Gbps and 4 x 25Gbps variants. CFP transceivers can support a single 100Gbps signal like 100GE or OTU4 or one or more 40Gbps signals like 40GE, OTU3, or STM-256/OC-768.

In addition, the CFP-MSA Committee has defined three form factors:

• CFP – Currently at standard revision 1.4 and is widely available in the market
• CFP2 – Currently at draft revision 0.3 is half the size of the CFP transceiver; these are recently available in the market
• CFP4 – CFP4 is half the size of a CFP2 transceiver, and is still rare in the market.

Pluggable CFP, CFP2 and CFP4 transceivers will support the ultra-high bandwidth requirements of data communications and telecommunication networks that form the backbone of the internet.

High-density CXP Transceiver

CXP is targeted at the clustering and high-speed computing markets and is the complement to CFP for Ethernet. Technically, the CFP will work with multimode fiber for short-reach applications, but it is not really optimized in size for the multimode fiber market, most notably because the multimode fiber market requires high faceplate density. The CXP is 45 mm in length and 27 mm in width, making it slightly larger than an XFP or 1/4 size of a CFP transceiver. It provides higher density network interfaces. It is a copper connector system specified by the InfiniBand Trade Association. It provides twelve 10 Gbps links suitable for 100 Gigabit Ethernet, three 40 Gigabit Ethernet Channels, or twelve 10 Gigabit Ethernet Channels or a single Infiniband 12× QDR link.

The CFP and CXP optical transceiver form factors are hot pluggable, both feature transmit and receive functions, and both support data rates of 40 and 100 Gbps. But the similarities begin and end there. Aimed primarily at 40- and 100-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) applications, the CFP supports both singlemode and multimode fiber and can accommodate a host of data rates, protocols, and link lengths. The CXP, by contrast, is targeted at the clustering and high-speed computing markets. The CFP and CXP form factors are complementary, with the CFP likely gaining traction in applications like Ethernet switches, core routers, and optical transport equipment, and the CXP covering the data center market.

Fiber-Mart 100G Transceiver Solution
Fiber-Mart 100G transceiver solution offers customers 100 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity options for data center networking, enterprise core aggregation, and service provider transport applications. We highly recommended 100GBASE-LR4 CFP2 and CFP4 modules. With the high compatibility, the CFP2 and CFP4 optics can be compatible with all kinds of equipment. In addition, our 100G transceivers offer significant advantages over existing solutions in terms of reduced power dissipation and increased density with the added benefit of pluggability for reduced first installed cost.

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