Opnext of Eatontown, New Jersey, a majority Hitachi-owned supplier of optical components and member of the QSFP MSA Group, concerned with developing the market for Quad (4-channel) Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) optical modules,

1. Whose membership consists of Avago Technologies, Beam Express, EMCORE, Emulex, Fiberxon, Finisar, Force10, Helix, JDSU, McDATA, MergeOptics, Molex, OCP, Opnext, Qlogic, Picolight, Reflex Photonics, Siemon, Tyco Electronics, Xloom Communications and Zarlink Semiconductor.

2. Which has developed a common specification for multi-sourcing, application-agnostic, high-density pluggable optical modules aimed at optimising real-estate, power and port density requirements in networking equipment, while maintaining synergy and compatibility with installed optical module interconnect infrastructure.

Announced on behalf of the Group the release of a Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable optical module specification draft for public review and feedback.

The draft specification describes a highly integrated, 4-channel optical transceiver to replace four standard SFP transceiver modules, providing increased port density and total system cost saving, specifically including:

1. Support for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and SONET/SDH standards with different data rate options up to 5 Gbit/s per channel.

2. A transceiver module mechanical form factor with latching mechanism, host board electrical edge connector and cage.

3. A hot-pluggable module integrating four transmit and four receive channels with a standard MPO parallel optical connector.

4. Digital diagnostic capability to monitor the link performance.

The aim of the specification is to establish the basis for a multi-vendor supported module design offering:

1. A highly integrated transceiver module design for extremely high-density applications with stacked and ganged configurations, enabling network equipment manufacturers to increase port density and system data throughput and consequently reduce costs per Gbit/s.

2. A port density of three times higher than traditional SFP transceivers, enabling the QSFP to replace four standard SFP modules in a space only 30% larger than a single SFP, and requiring approximately the same front-panel space as an XFP module, thus enabling over 3X (3.11) times more transceivers to be placed in a given area on a switch or product.

3. A package and electrical/optical connectors derived from designs currently in production.

4. A repackaging of the existing SFP transceiver in a way that supports the use of a 12-fibre ribbon instead of individual fibres.

5. Potential for aggregated higher volumes and improved economics realised from several protocols/applications using the same transceiver.

6. What is described as "the world's first Z-pluggable parallel optical transceiver".

7. An inherent 4+4 channel architecture able to support increased distances via multi-lane serial I/O electrical interconnect technologies like PCI Express (PCIe) and Infiniband.

NB: The QSFP MSA Group came into existence in 2004 and the specification now offered for public review was first announced in March 2006, at which time it was expected the draft might be available in May 2006.

Much of the above material was already covered at the time of the March announcement, however there may now be subtle variations. In May 2006, Zarlink Semiconductor acquired mixed-signal IC specialist Primarion, which was an independent member of the 22-member group at that time.