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Optoelectronic Interconnect Trending to Surface Mount
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Miniaturization and speed, two major considerations in today's fiber component design, are being met by surface mount, which reduces board space and assembly cost.
By Jeff D. Montgomery
Over the past 20 years, the dominant drive behind fiber optics has been to establish immense-capacity fiber pipelines between telco central offices, plus continental and global telco and Internet fiber pipelines. The main effort and investment of this phase has been completed; fiber is in place, and the throughput of these trunk lines can be increased two to three orders of magnitude by increased dense wavelength division multiplexers (DWDM), expanding into additional spectral bands and adding higher data rate optoelectronics. Incremental fiber additions will continue, especially in less developed countries, but the big push is behind us. The next task is to connect these pipelines to the hundreds of millions of subscribers, large and small.
The term "access network" has been assigned a variety of meanings, one being the connection from subscribers to the regulated telco central office (CO) or the Internet carrier point of presence (PoP).
The 2001 lull in fiber optic deployment was due to several factors, but mainly, due to the fiber access links not being deployed quickly enough to meet the demand. There were several reasons for this slowness of response by service providers and subscribers. These impediments are being solved; access fiber connections grew rapidly through 2001, and are accelerating in 2002.
The rapid increase in new access fiber connections depends on nature of service, quality of service, dependability perception of service providers and cost. SMT is part of the cost solution.
Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL) have emerged from 20 years of research and development (R&D) and production design to power the transmitters of choice for short-medium reach (centimeters to 10 km). For various reasons, VCSEL-based transceivers (especially multifiber modules) can be produced at much lower cost than edge emitter laser-based modules. VCSELs expanded rapidly from 1999 to 2001 into 850 nm, multimode fiber transmitter volume consumption, mainly in short reach intra-equipment connections. Some communication equipment, such as digital crossconnect switches and high-end servers, have hundreds of internal interconnect fiber links, with strong pressure on lower cost per gigabit and miniaturization.
VCSEL transmitters now have evolved to commercial availability for 1,300 nm band singlemode, 10 Gbps and will be commercial for the 1,500 nm band single-mode applications by 2003. The forecast of production quantities of VCSEL-based transmitter-receiver modules is presented in Figure 1.1
Figure 1. VCSEL Transmitter/Receiver Global Consumption Quantity, 2000-2005. (Source: Optoelectronic and Fiber Optic Components Packages and Packaging Forecast, September 2001.)
Fiber optic-based components, subsystems and equipment have become much more complex over the past decade. Yet, new fiber interconnect systems typically are installed in previously existing space. So, there is increasing end-customer pressure that next-generation equipment, though having one to two orders of magnitude greater capability, must not occupy more space. Miniaturization is a major theme in all fiber component design. A large majority of these components is installed on printed circuit boards (PCBs) or optical backplanes, in which SMT can reduce board space and assembly cost.
Surface Mount Speeds Production In 2001, some communication equipment, such as digital crossconnect switches and high-end servers, had hundreds of fiber optic signal interconnect links. By 2005, multi-terabit routers will have more than 1,000 internal fiber links. The transmitters and receivers of these links will be mounted on high-density, multilayer PCBs. Electronic component assembly to these boards has been trending rapidly to surface mounting, led by IBM. For such applications, SMT optoelectronic transceiver packaging makes them physically compatible with the electronic circuit packages, and simplifies and accelerates assembly.
Figure 2. Corona Optical Systems OptoCube 40 Transceiver. Photo Source: Corona Optical Systems.
An excellent example of an SMT packaged VCSEL-based fiber optic multichannel datacom transceiver is the Corona Optical Systems OptoCube 40, shown in Figure 2. The OptiCube40 powers an OC-768 VSR LINK; 40 Gbps via 2.5 Gbps on each of 16 parallel fiber links. The 13 x 13 mm ball grid array package is offered with numerous optional heat sinks.
Several companies are developing, and some are shipping, a wide range of multichannel, multifiber short reach, low-cost-per-gigabit transceivers. Multichannel transceivers providing 256-channel transmission, 10 Gbps per channel, will be available by the end of 2003. There will be a strong trend toward SMT packaging of these, as well as the simpler duplex transceivers.
REFERENCE1 Optoelectronic and Fiber Optic Components Packages and Packaging Forecast, September 2001.
For more information, contact Jeff D. Montgomery, chairman and founder of ElectroniCast Corp., 800 South Claremont St., San Mateo, CA 94402; (650) 343-1398; Fax: (650) 343-1698; E-mail: jmontgomery@electronicast.com; Web site: www.electronicast.com.