Reference-design kits emerge for optical transceivers

摘要

Reference designs provided by IC vendors serve as a keystone of product development in the electronics world. Thus to many, it came as no surprise when IC vendors began to offer reference-design kits for optical transceivers and transceiver modules earlier this year. In February, Analog Devices (Norwood, MA) released a reference design for a 2.5-Gbit/ sec small-form-factor-pluggable (SFP) transceiver, the de facto multisource-agree-ment (MSA) form factor in the storage, Ethernet, and metro SONET/SDH markets. Market researcher iSuppli (El Segundo, CA) forecasts that seven million SFP trans-ceivers will be used in the network storage market next year, and 1.4 billion OC-48 SFP transceivers in the telecommunications/ metro SONET/SDH market during the same time period.