Development History Of China's Optical Communication Device Industry

Optical modules are the core products and final products in the production process of optical communication devices. With the development of optical communication industry, optical modules are also evolving, and miniaturization, low cost, high speed and other characteristics are the main direction of product iteration.

The optical module first appeared in 1999. It is a product packaged with SC optical head 1X9, which is integrated on the circuit board of communication equipment as a fixed optical module. Later, 1X9 packaged products gradually turned to miniaturization and hot pluggable. SFF module comes from the attempt of miniaturization, and it still adopts the fixed usage, and is directly integrated on the circuit board with LC head. The optical module born in the direction of hot pluggable is GBIC, which was widely used in network equipment such as switches and routers at that time. Compared with the fixed optical module, it has obvious advantages. It can be used as an independent module to facilitate update, maintenance and fault location. However, with the development of the network, the demand for the number of optical ports of network equipment is increasing. The larger volume of GBIC leads to the smaller optical port density of the equipment, which cannot adapt to the rapid development trend of the network. After technical exploration and optimization, the upgraded version of GBIC, the SFP optical module with miniaturization and hot pluggable functions, has been successfully developed. Its volume is only 1/2-1/3 of that of GBIC, which has improved the optical port density of network equipment. Since its appearance, it has been widely used, and has achieved a unified interface communication mode. Network equipment from various manufacturers can be compatible and can be purchased as separate equipment. After the birth of SFP, on the road of miniaturization, high speed, low cost and other characteristics optimization, optical module products using XENPARK, XPARK, XFP, CFP, SFP+and other packaging methods have emerged one after another. The size is getting smaller and smaller, the use is becoming more and more convenient, and the cost is gradually declining. The supported speed is also less than 10Gbps at the beginning to the current highest 800Gbps. The technical level of optical modules in all aspects has made considerable progress in more than 20 years.