Introduction on 100G CFP/CFP2/CFP4 Optical Transceivers

How Much Do You Know About CFP/CFP2/CFP4 Optical Transceivers

100G CFP/CFP2/CFP4 Optical Transceivers: Do You Know?

Because the size of the CFP optical transceiver is too large to meet the high-density requirements
of Data Center, the CFP-MSA board defined two new CFP series optical transceivers: CFP2 optical
transceiver and CFP4 optical transceiver. Therefore, there are three types of optical transceivers
in the 100G CFP series based on different sizes of the form factors. In this article, we are going to
talk about CFP / CFP2 / CFP4 in detail.

An Overview of CFP / CFP2 / CFP4

CFP optical transceiver is largest, CFP2 optical transceiver is one half of the CFP, and CFP4 optical
transceiver is one quarter of the CFP. The size of these three modules is shown as below. CFP /
CFP2 / CFP4 cannot be used interchangeably, but they can be used simultaneously in the same
system.

CFP optical transceiver supports transmission on a single-mode and multi-mode fiber at a variety
of rates, protocols, and link lengths, including all the physical media dependent (PMD) interfaces
included in the IEEE 802.3ba standard. CFP optical transceiver is based on the Small Form Factor
Pluggable Optical transceiver (SFP) interface and is larger in size to support 100 Gbps data
transmission. CFP optical transceiver can support a single 100G signal, OTU4, one or more 40G
signals, OTU3 or STM-256 / OC-768. There are mainly three kinds of 100G CFP optical
transceivers: CFP 100GBASE-SR10, CFP 100GBASE-LR4 and CFP 100GBASE-ER4.
100G CFP2 optical transceivers are commonly used as 100G Ethernet interconnects and deliver
higher transmission efficiencies than CFP optical transceivers. The smaller size also makes them
suitable for higher density cabling. CFP2 100GBASE-SR10, CFP2 100GBASE-LR4 and CFP 2
100GBASE-ER4 are three mostly-used CFP2 optical transceivers in the current market.
Compared with CFP / CFP2 optical transceiver, 100G CFP4 optical transceiver has the same rate
but the transmission efficiency has greatly improved. Besides, the power consumption is reduced
and the cost is lower than CFP2. CFP4 optical transceiver has irreplaceable advantages. We will
discuss it in the second part.

The Advantages of CFP4 Optical Transceiver

1. Higher transmission efficiency: The early 100G CFP optical transceiver, through 10*10G
channel, to 100G transmission rate, and now 100G CFP4 optical transceiver through 4*25G
channel, 100G transmission, so the transmission efficiency is higher and more stable.

2. Smaller size: CFP4 optical transceiver is one-fourth of the CFP, and is the smallest optical
transceiver in the CFP series optical transceiver.

3. Module integration is higher: CFP2 integration is 2 times of CFP, CFP4 integration is four times
of CFP.

4. Lower power consumption and cost: CFP4 optical transceiver transmission efficiency has been
improved significantly, but the power consumption is decreased and the system cost is lower
than CFP2.

In Conclusion:

By learning the above information about 100G CFP / CFP2 / CFP4 optical transceiver, you may
have some further understanding about the optical transceiver series. Gigalight not only has
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online e-commerce platform - inFiberone to meet their needs. More professional tutorials and
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