OREANDA-NEWS.  March 15, 2011. Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd., and the U.S. based OFS, Specialty Photonics Division today announced a high-output narrow-linewidth full-band tunable laser for ultra-high bit rate 100-Gbps digital coherent transmission. The full-band tunable laser provides superior performance as a signal light source and/or a local light source for digital coherent communication systems. Furukawa Electric has begun shipping commercial samples. The product will be exhibited at OFC/NFOEC 2011, the world's largest international conference/exhibition on telecommunications.

Background

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the volume network infrastructure traffic, due to several enterprise and consumer market trends including cloud computing, data centers, video on demand (VoD), voice over IP (VoIP), video distribution, ubiquity of smartphones, popularity of social networks and peer to peer applications. As a result, the access, metro and long-haul network infrastructure will be required to plan and expand for ever increasing network capacity demand, eventually increasing the use for tunability in various systems and networks containing add/drop points.

This scheme has already been employed in parts of Europe and is expected to be deployed full-scale in North America in 2012. In the digital coherent scheme, interference between phase-modulated signal light and local light is utilized for demodulation at the receiving side to obtain intensity-modulated signal light. Since high coherency is required to suppress errors at the time of signal demodulation, both the signal light and local light are required to be low in oscillation spectrum width or narrow in linewidth.
With its proven track record in signal light source for optical network systems, Furukawa developed a full-band tunable laser, utilizing its developed technology for full-band tunable lasers of distributed feedback (DFB) laser array type. The tunable laser has an output of higher than 40 mW with a linewidth of lower than 500 kHz. These specifications are expected to deliver superior performance as a signal light source and/or a local light source for digital coherent communication systems.

Item

Specification

Tunable wavelength range

1528 ~ 1564 nm (C band)

Optical output

40 mW (at C band)

Linewidth

< 500 kHz

Side-mode suppression ratio

> 40 dB

Average relative intensity noise

< -145 dB/Hz

Wavelength stability

< ±2.5 GHz