Introduction to CML Technology

CML™ is a technology that I plan to discuss in many more postings.

CML stands for Chirp Managed Laser. CML technology was originally developed by a company called Azna which Finisar acquired in 2007. The original team remains largely intact and we are continuing to develop this technology in our Wilmington, MA facility.

One of the key advantages of CML technology is that it has extremely good dispersion properties over fiber. For example, Finisar has developed an XFP that is dispersion tolerant to over 200km of SMF at 10Gb/s. At OFC this year, we also published a post-deadline paper showing the results of some testing where we were able to make an SFP+ at 10Gb/s run without dispersion compensation over 360km of fiber. Of course, this 360km SFP+ is not a real product, only a lab experiment, but it puts into light some of the awesome capabilities of this technology.

We are developing several flavors of CML transmitters (including TOSA and butterfly packages) in our Wilmington, MA facility, and all of these will be manufactured in our Shanghai facility. Many of those will end-up in Finisar modules.

If you have any questions or thoughts about Finisar’s CML technology, feel free to comment here.