We are now starting to see commercial 5G networks going live. Previous generations were focused on consumer and personal communications but now 5G will serve consumers, enterprises and take the internet of things to the next level, where superior connectivity is a prerequisite. Initially, 5G will be a capacity enhancer in metropolitan areas and enhanced mobile broadband and fixed wireless access will be ways for operators to address explosive traffic growth.
According to LightCounting, 5G will drive significant growth in the global market for optical transceivers since 2019, especially in China. At the same time, the demand for low-speed optical devices below 10G will gradually decrease and increase in the demand for transceivers of 25G, 50G, and 100G.
The change of optical transceiver demand is driven by 5G revolution. RAN architecture of the 5G system will realize the separation of CU and DU, which determines that 5G wireless network will include fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul. New requirements are proposed in terms of the amount of optical transceiver and the technical requirements of the optical transceiver.
Optical transceivers Need to Be Able to Meet the Requirements for Bearer Network in 5G Era
Fronthaul
The transmission distance should be within 10km or even shorter. The operating temperature should reach industrial temperature and the CPRI interface rate should reach 25Gbps.
Midhaul
The transmission distance should be at least 10km and the operating temperature should reach the commercial temperature. Gray optical transceiver or BiDi is mainly considered. In addition, 50G PAM4 may be a good choice.
Backhaul
The transmission distance should be more than 10km and the operating temperature should reach the commercial temperature. The 100G, 200G, 400G rate optical transceiver is mainly used. In addition, WDM or coherence technology will be taken into consideration.
Since the evolution of CPRI interface to PRI will lead to an increase of RRU power consumption, more heat-resistant optical transceivers are needed. In addition, the wireless architecture will evolve from DRAN to CRAN, and there will be a shortage of optical cable resources, which requires more energy-saving optical transceivers. In addition, 5G will use a higher frequency band, the coverage will be smaller, and the number of optical transceivers will be greatly increased so that the low-cost optical transceivers are needed. At the same time, 5G’s spectrum bandwidth increases transmission bandwidth, and higher speed optical transceivers are needed to meet this demand.
Conclusion
All in all, the core requirements for optical devices in wireless scenarios are mainly reflected in higher operating temperature range, less fiber resource consumption, lower cost, and faster single wave rate.
How to meet these needs of optical transceivers in the 5G era?
The solutions for High-temperature transceiver — industrial temperature light chip and silicon light can make the optical device itself work at high temperature, and can guarantee rapid heat conduction through good thermal design.
The solutions for optical fiber resource shortage—the most obvious solution is to use BiDi, which can save 50% of the optical fiber resources and thus use the existing optical fiber resources to transmit twice the bandwidth. Passive WDM solutions are also available.
Building on the success of the company’s 10G CWDM SFP+
transceiver and 10G DWDM SFP+ transceiver, Gigalight developed its next-generation 25G CWDM in an SFP28 form factor. And Gigalight 25G SFP28 BiDi optical transceivers are available. This technology is believed to be a key building block for deploying these transceivers and is designed to enable cost-effective next-generation 5G wireless build-outs while also providing significantly more data capacity per fiber than other 25Gbased optical architectures. This will enable Transceiver-to-transceiver communications and self-wavelength tuning of remote transceivers during commissioning without host interaction, so field installation and remote maintenance are simplified and operational expenses are lowered.
According to different scenarios, there are different requirements for optical transceivers. The traditional optical device technology in the field can meet the current needs, but there is a trend to update the technical field of evolution. At the same time, the realization path of the growth of optical transceiver rate also presents a diversification trend. Finally, no matter what you need are, Gigalight is here to create, assist and innovate.