A compact, low-cost WDM transceiver for the LAN

As the bandwidth requirements of local area networks (LANs) continue to increase, ever-faster fiber-optic links will be required in the backbones which aggregate the traffic of many users. A need has emerged for low-cost 10-Gb/s fiber-optic links in LAN backbones, prompting the IEEE to begin work on a standard for "10-Gigabit Ethernet". To take advantage of the large installed base of multimode optical fiber, as well as low-cost electronics and electrical interconnect technologies, a wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) fiber-optic module has been proposed in which four data channels, each transmitting at a data rate of 2.5 Gb/s on a different wavelength, are carried over a single fiber. In this paper, a fully integrated transceiver is described in which four lasers, four detectors, a wavelength multiplexer, a wavelength demultiplexer, and all necessary electronics are contained within a duplex-connectorized module. The component technologies that enable the transceiver to be compact and low-cost are also described.