Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that it will begin shipping samples of its new tunable laser-diode chip for use in optical transceivers of optical-fiber communication systems on October 1. The new chip is expected to help increase the capacity of digital coherent communication as well as reduce the size of optical transceivers. Data communication volume is rapidly increasing due to the spread of 5G mobile communication networks and the popularization of video-streaming services. In response, the capacity of high-speed communication needs to be increased from 100Gbps at present to 400Gbps in optical-fiber networks for communication between data centers as well as long distance communication.

Therefore, digital coherent communication systems are now being deployed to improve communication efficiency in optical-fiber networks. At the same time, however, optical transceivers must be further downsized to accommodate space limitations in network equipment, but until now tunable laser diodes have been built into packages, making downsizing difficult.