"The Internet continues to make new demands of the optical transceiver industry," says Roy Rubenstein, Director of Research at LightCounting. "Technology has a key role to play in helping transceiver players meet new requirements while giving their designs an edge, in performance and in reducing costs, in what is a fiercely competitive marketplace."
Introduction
The opto-electronic transceiver industry has experienced its fair share of growing pains but has emerged all the stronger for it. Lessons learnt during the telecom downturn of 2001–2003 in particular will serve firms well as they navigate the stormy market conditions expected in 2009 and 2010.
Now, as the transceiver industry enters adulthood, it will need to use all of its experience to exploit emerging market opportunities that will use increasingly complex technologies. That optical transceiver opportunities exist despite the economic downturn is due to the continual growth in data traffic that shows no signs of abating. All of the world’s voice, video, and data traffic travel though opto-electronic transceivers at some point in the network. And transceivers will only become more pervasive with time.
LightCounting’s first technology review report looks at key market trends driving optical transceiver use. Bandwidth growth drivers are impacting the access, metro, and long-haul networks, as well as impacting the datacenter in the need for faster connections, which brings to the fore the ongoing battle between copper and optical interconnects.
Optical transceivers must address these market drivers via several technical considerations and developments, including the need for greater speed, which will be met in a variety of ways such as the adoption of advanced modulation schemes; the use of parallel and serial interconnect and multiple wavelengths per fiber; and new disruptive developments, like active optical cable and silicon photonics. Practical issues, such as manufacturing, also must be weighed: the way a company makes its transceivers plays a critical part in its success irrespective of the opto-electronic smarts crammed inside transceivers.
The market is also witnessing the merging of once-separate optics and electronics design domains. The two domains now play complementary roles in transceiver and optical system design. Additional technologies, established and new, promise to benefit transceiver design. One is optical integration, a not-so-new technique that will increasing be used as higher-speed transceiver designs become more prominent. Silicon photonics is another, this time a fresh approach. The primary market of silicon
photonics remains inter- and intra-chip communication for emerging computing requirements, but it could end up playing a key role for the telecom and datacom transceiver markets.
Report Outline
LightCounting’s first Technology Review report addresses the high-speed interface market for datacom and telecom. From the LAN to the WAN, the report addresses copper and fibre interfaces ranging in speed from 4-Gbps to 100-Gbps; from short range parallel optics – POP4 and SNAP12 - to emerging 100-Gbps Ethernet standards, as well as the 4, 8 and 16-Gbps Fibre Channel standards. View the table of contents (TOC)
The comprehensive report addresses the following:
- The key markets and drivers fueling transceiver development
- The underlying forces and markets advancing the transceiver business
- How the issues of speed, cost, and power are being addressed by transceiver manufacturers
- How manufacturing is turning out to be a major competitive weapon for vendors
- How electronics and optics are boosting link performance and reducing transceiver and system cost
- Whether photonic integration technologies are ready to radically transform the industry
Target audience
Sales/ marketing professionals addressing the datacom and telecom markets, executives developing business strategies, and the investment community interested in copper and optical high-speed interface opportunities.
