OFC highlights a burgeoning coherent pluggable market
Friday, March 25, 2022 at 1:45PM A trend evident at the OFC show earlier this month was the growing variety of coherent pluggable modules on display.
Whereas a coherent module maker would offer a product based on a coherent digital signal processor (DSP) and a basic design and then add a few minor tweaks, now the variety of modules offered reflects the growing needs of the network operators.
Tom WilliamsAcacia, part of Cisco, announced two coherent pluggable to coincide with OFC.
The Bright 400ZR+ QSFP-DD pluggable form factor is based on Acacia’s existing 400ZR+ offering. It has a higher transmit power of up to 5dBm and includes a tunable filter to improve the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) performance.
Acacia’s second coherent module is the fixed wavelength 400-gigabit 400G ER1 module designed for point-to-point applications.
“I can understand it being a little bit confusing,” says Tom Williams, vice president of marketing at Acacia. “We have maybe five or six configurations of modules based on the same underlying DSP and optical technology.”
