CWDM4 Transmission Technology for Data Center

Evolution of Optical Transmission Technology in Data Center
With the popularization and application of mobile Internet, data center has developed rapidly and become an important infrastructure in the information society. The data center consists of a large number of servers. High speed and large capacity data transmission and exchange are needed between servers. The traditional cable transmission cannot meet the speed requirements. Optical fiber transmission technology has entered the data center since 2010, and has become the mainstream transmission technology.

What is CCWDM(Compact Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing)?

CCWDM is Compact CWDM (Compact Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing), which is a wavelength division multiplexing technology based on TFF (Thin Film Filter). It works in the same way as CWDM modules, except that CCWDM uses free space technology (As shown in Figure 1), compared with the common CWDM fiber cascading method (as shown in Figure 2). The package size of CCWDM is smaller than CWDM and with lower insertion loss and better consistency. CCWDM can be used to replace the CWDM products in telecommunications, corporate networks, PON networks, cable TV and other fields. The lower insertion loss makes the CCWDM module have lower signal attenuation when used, thereby reducing the power requirements of the signal transmitter.

WDM Devices — TFF-based WDM Devices

As we know, optical fiber communication is one of the enabling technologies for Internet and changed the world. The advantage of optical fiber communication is to transmit dozens of wavelengths in a single optical fiber, which is called wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). The basic devices for WDM transmission are optical filters, which can be realized by fused biconical taper (FBT), thin film filter (TFF), arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) and optical interleaver. TFF and AWG are most commonly used in the WDM system. This paper discusses TFF-based WDM devices.

Thin Film Filter
Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) is a commonly used interferometer for spectrum filtering. The structure of a FPI is shown in Fig.1, which consists of two glass plates spaced by a spacer with precise thickness. The inner surfaces of the plates are coated for partial reflection and the outer surfaces are usually anti-reflection (AR) coated.