
Mitsubishi Electric announced today that it has developed a 200Gbps electro-absorption modulator laser diode (EML) chip. The new chip doubles the speed of the company’s existing 100Gbps EML chip thanks to a proprietary hybrid waveguide structure. Support for coarse wavelength division multiplexing of four wavelengths realizes 800Gbps transmission using four chips or 1.6Tbps using eight chips.

The new chip supports four CWDM wavelengths—1271, 1291, 1311 and 1331nm—similar to the company’s existing 100Gbps products, allowing optical signals of different wavelengths to be multiplexed in a single optical fiber, thereby reducing the number of fibers required. Four chips in one transceiver can achieve 800Gbps and eight chips can achieve 1.6Tbps.

The greatly improved performance is expected to raise the transmission speed of optical transceivers used in data centers to respond to mushrooming data-traffic demand due to the rapid growth of video distribution services and cloud computing. Mitsubishi Electric will present its new chip at the Optical Fiver Communication Conference and Exhibition 2023.