40G QSFP+ Module And CFP Module Wiki

A transceiver module is a self-contained component that can both transmit and receive. The transceiver acts to connect the electrical circuitry of the module with the optical or copper network. Devices such as routers or network interface cards provide one or more transceiver module slot (like GBIC, SFP, XFP) into which you can insert a transceiver module which is appropriate for that connection. The optical fiber, or wire, plugs into a connector on the transceiver module. There are multiple types of transceiver module available for use with different types of wire, fiber, different wavelengths within a fiber, and for communication over different distances.

The reason why the fiber optic transceiver received so much attention, because it has so many advantages compared with other means of communication, such as large capacity, long distance transmission, small size, light weight, easy to construct and maintain, cost less and so on. In the following I would like to have a brief introduction of 40G QSFP+ Module and CFP module.

What is QSFP+?
The 40GBASE QSFP+ (Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus) modules offer customers a wide variety of high-density 40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity options for data center, high-performance computing networks, enterprise core and distribution layers, and service provider transport applications.

Features and Benefits

Main features of 40GBASE QSFP+ modules include:

• Support for 40GBASE Ethernet;

• Hot-swappable input/output device that plugs into a 40-Gigabit Ethernet QSFP+ Cisco switch port;

• Flexibility of interface choice;

• Interoperable with other IEEE-compliant 40GBASE interfaces available in various form factors;

• Support for “pay-as-you-populate” model;

• Support for the Cisco quality identification (ID) feature which enables a Cisco switch to identify whether the module is certified and tested by Cisco.

What is CFP?
CFP stands for C form-factor pluggable, it is a multi-source agreement to produce a common form-factor for the transmission high-speed digital signals. The c stands for the Latin letter C used to express the number 100 (centum), as the standard was primarily developed for 100 Gigabit Ethernet systems. The CFP was designed after the SFP interface, but is significantly larger to support 100 Gigabit by using 10 lanes in each direction (RX, TX) with 10Gb/s each.

While the electrical connection of a CFP uses 10 x 10 Gbit/s lanes in each direction (RX, TX), the optical connection can support both 10 x 10 Gbit/s and 4 x 25 Gbit/s variants of 100 Gbit/s interconnects (typically referred to as 100GBASE-LR10 and 100GBASE-LR4 in 10 km reach, and 100GBASE-ER10 and 100GBASE-ER4 in 40 km reach respectively.) In March 2009, Santur demonstrated a 100 Gigabit pluggable CFP Transceiver prototype, Santur 100G CFP Transceiver.

The CFP module is specified by a multi-source agreement (MSA) between competing manufacturers. The CFP MSA defines hot-pluggable optical transceiver form factors to enable 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s applications, including next-generation High Speed Ethernet (40GbE and 100GbE). Pluggable CFP, CFP2 and CFP4 transceivers will support the ultra-high bandwidth requirements of data communications and telecommunication networks that form the backbone of the internet.