JDSU Intros Tunable XFP

MILPITAS, Calif. and SAN DIEGO -- JDSU (NasdaqGS:JDSU - News) (Toronto:JDU.TO - News) today announced the industry's first monolithically integrated and tunable optical transceiver. The JDSU tunable XFP transceiver is 85 percent smaller than previous tunable products, allowing network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) to pack more transceiver interfaces into a system or to deploy smaller systems within a network node. This in turn opens up valuable real estate for their service provider customers in network central offices.

In addition, the tunable XFP transceiver will be the first pluggable solution that service providers can deploy without fully populating line cards, so that technicians can easily provision more transceivers to the line card in the field as needed in a "pay-as-you-grow" fashion, without affecting network performance.

The dramatically smaller size of the tunable XFP transceiver will also reduce power dissipation by 60 percent, greatly reducing electrical and cooling costs within network central offices.JDSU began sampling the tunable XFP transceiver with customers in 2008 and expects to ship the product in volume by summer of 2009.

As increased consumer use of online video, voice and data applications continues to put demands on network capacity, NEMs and service providers are under pressure to add optical solutions that can manage increased bandwidth flexibly and cost effectively. Optical transceivers, such as the tunable XFP transceiver, act as a key interface that convert optical signals into electrical data as they exit dense wavelength division multiplexer (DWDM) networks.

"It is quite an accomplishment that JDSU was able to create a tunable solution and get all of the functionality into an XFP form factor," said Daryl Inniss, vice president and practice leader of Communications Components at Ovum. "The new JDSU tunable XFP transceiver could help system vendors realize a wide range of benefits including increased density, lower costs, and more flexible deployment options."

JDSU (Nasdaq: JDSU; Toronto: JDU)