OIF Projects Address Optical Miniaturization, Integration
In an effort to help decrease the size of optics so they can be integrated into a great range of market solutions, the Optical Internetworking Forum has initiated work on two optical interface projects.
IC-TROSA is the name of one of the projects. This one aims to enable manufacturers to have a higher level of integration for transmit and receive optical components.
CFP2-DCO is the other project. It involves the method by which to build address management interface and identify registers. These are needed to communicate with the modules’ DSPs used in coherent modulation.
“The IC-TROSA project tackles much more than just a simple size reduction,” explained Karl Gass of Qorvo, and vice chair of the OIF’s Physical and Link Layer Working Group – Optical. “It addresses optical packaging in a way that isn’t done in high volumes today. We want to come to industry consensus in this pre-competitive environment.”
IC-TROSA, which stands for Integrated Coherent Transmitter-Receiver Optical Subassembly, combines Polarization Multiplexed Quadrature Transmitter and Integrated Coherent Receiver components to create a single integrated optics package. The result is an optical sub-assembly that supports high-bandwidth and high-order QAM operations for use in data center interconnect, metro, and long-haul applications.
As for CFP2-DCO, this project addresses 100G, 200G or 400G applications for metro, long-haul, and data center interconnections. Its support
such formats as DP-QPSK and DP-xQAM.
In other recent OIF news, the group announced a collaboration with the Open Networking Foundation. The two organizations plan to create and test an API for software-defined networking transport.
The application programming interface will allow the optical and packet layers of the network to better address link failures and peak traffic events as they arise. The OIF expects to stage interoperability demonstrations of the API this fall.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
