The Optical Internetworking Forum’s (OIF) has begun work on two optical interface projects:
the IC-TROSA project would enable manufacturers to have a higher level of integration for transmit and receive optical components. Integrated Coherent Transmitter-Receiver Optical Subassembly (IC-TROSA) is the evolutionary step that combines Polarization Multiplexed Quadrature (PMQ) Transmitter (Tx) and Integrated Coherent Receiver (ICR) components to create a single integrated optics package. The optical sub-assembly that supports high-bandwidth and high-order QAM operations is suited for data center interconnect, metro and long-haul applications. As module sizes decrease, current coherent optics components need similar size reductions to enable next generation multi-terabit switches, line cards, and transport. Density requirements for next-gen line cards, front-pluggable and future on-board 400G+ optical modules are driving the need for further integration and miniaturization.
the CFP2-Digital Coherent Optics (DCO) project will work with other standards bodies to implement coherent modulations formats in CFP modules. The OIF’s CFP2-DCO project includes a way to build address management interface and identify registers necessary to talk to the DSP located in the module, specific to coherent modulation techniques. The CFP2-DCO is intended to be used for 100G, 200G or 400G applications for metro, long-haul and data center interconnections and it can support different formats such as DP-QPSK and DP-xQAM.
“The IC-TROSA project tackles much more than just a simple size reduction,” said Karl Gass of Qorvo and the OIF’s Physical and Link Layer (PLL) Working Group – Optical vice chair. “It addresses optical packaging in a way that isn’t done in high volumes today. We want to come to industry consensus in this pre-competitive environment.”
