OREANDA-NEWS. Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. has commenced commercial production of its micro Integrated Tunable Laser Assembly (ITLA), a key component in ultra-high-speed optical digital coherent transmission devices. The integration of micro ITLA into optical digital coherent transmission equipment is now available to telecommunications carriers, supporting more efficient next generation transmission systems.

Global network traffic continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. The telecommunications industry is accelerating the deployment of 100 Gb/s, or even faster 400 Gb/s, transmission systems, and converging on optical digital coherent technology. These new systems use multilevel modulation like 16 bit Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) for 400 Gb/s, as well as elastic spectrum allocation to improve the spectral efficiency of the network. A more efficient micro ITLA is critical for such new complex and high-performing systems.

Furukawa Electric has started the commercial production of the micro ITLA. This micro ITLA is a laser light source that has been made smaller and consumes less electric power, while complying with the same Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) standard as the conventional ITLA. Furukawa Electric has developed the micro ITLA with narrower line width, a finer wavelength grid and better wavelength stability, which are required for higher speed digital coherent transmission and flexible grid in the elastic optical network technology.

Furukawa has developed technologies for manufacturing the micro ITLAs enabling a size reduction to 37.5 x 20 x 7.5 mm, half the size of a conventional ITLA. In addition, power consumption was reduced by 30% in comparison with that of conventional ITLAs, driven by performance improvements in the laser chip.