Now, a little history about the SFP+ (enhanced small form factor pluggable) transceiver. Finisar began shipping this new form factor in 2007 as a solution offering a smaller footprint and higher performance capabilities compared to the SFP transceiver design. Today it is used primarily in 8 Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gbps Ethernet networking equipment including switches, routers, Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), and Network Interface Cards (NIC cards).

For more than twenty years, we have led the industry in volume production of optical communication components used by some of the world’s largest networking equipment manufacturers and system providers. I believe this is a direct result of our strategic focus on building internal design and manufacturing capabilities which not only supply many of our own components but also provide more tools to innovate and deliver leading-edge products to our customers.

I am excited to begin the new year on such a positive note for Finisar as well as the entire optics industry. I’d like to take a moment to wish all of our Lightspeed readers a wonderful new year. I look forward to blogging with you in 2010!

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.