Finisar develops Miniature Coherent Transmitter and Receiver Assembly

Finisar introduced the industry's smallest fully integrated coherent optics assembly, designed for coherent line cards or DCO (Digital Coherent Optics) transceivers.

Finisar's Integrated Tunable Transmitter and Receiver Assembly (ITTRA) will be marketed as a new product family for helping customers to accelerate their time to market and reduce program and development costs.  It provides the same functionality as a CFP2-ACO but is 70% smaller than the size of a CFP2 module. All key building blocks of an ACO interface (tunable laser, optical amplifier, modulators, drivers, coherent mixer, photodiode array, and TIAs) are incorporated in a single optical sub-assembly, which is combined with a miniature controller board that provides customers a standardized management interface.

Finisar said that because the ITTRA is a fully calibrated and tested assembly instead of a disaggregated set of components, it yields operational cost savings for the line card or module integrator because test times of the end product are greatly reduced.

"Customers that have previewed this product acknowledge the exceptional level of integration achieved in Finisar's ITTRA, and we have a tremendous amount of interest in this product due to its performance, compact footprint, and low power dissipation," said John DeMott, Senior Director of Marketing at Finisar. "A turn-key solution like the ITTRA, greatly reduces the development effort for the line card or module integrator, allowing them to rapidly respond to new market opportunities." The demonstration at OFC 2018 shows the 32Gbaud ITTRA transmitting and receiving data at 200 Gb/s using DP-16QAM modulation. The product will be sampling in the second quarter of 2018.

At OFC 2018, Finisar also demonstrated its WaveShaper A Series of Programmable Optical Processors with newly released WaveShaper App revision 1.3. This software supports arbitrary power splitting on up to 16 ports with ratios of up to 100 to 1. Finisar demonstrated a WaveShaper processor covering the extended C+L band with a total wavelength range larger than 100 nm. Arbitrary filtering of attenuation and phase is supported across the entire range.