Jun 3 2008
Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd., today announced that it has now shipped more than 10 million units of optical transmitters/receivers/transceivers.
Optical fiber was widely installed in buildings in early 1980s. As a result, optical LANs became popular in the United States. At the beginning there were no standards for optical LANs, but the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) established Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), the world wide standard of 125Mb/s optical LAN with the maximum transmission distance of 2km over multi mode fiber.
At that time, Sumitomo Electric was looking for business opportunities through its subsidiaries in the United States and embarked on standards activity to develop FDDI transceivers. With critical development of lasers and detectors which could operate up to 125Mb/s, Sumitomo Electric established a development organization for 1.3um Light Emitting Diode (LED) and Photo Diode (PD) using in-house semiconductor wafers. Sumitomo Electric started volume production of FDDI transceivers at its Yokohama Works in 1985. FDDI transceivers have been delivered to key FDDI LAN equipment suppliers all over the world.
Shortly thereafter in 1988, Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH), a standard for public communication systems using single mode fiber, was standardized by the International Telecommunication Unit (ITU). After that, the demand for single mode fiber became larger than that for multi mode fiber. Considering such a demand change, Sumitomo Electric judged that the market of transceivers for long reach optical applications was promising and necessary and started development of Distributed FeedBack Laser Diode (DFB-LD) and Fabry-Perot Laser Diode (FP-LD) for use in single mode optical applications. The volume production of 156Mb/s and 622Mb/s optical transmitters/receivers started in 1993 and the volume production of 2.5Gb/s devices started in 1994 followed by 10Gb/s transceivers in 2000.
As a result of our achievement and technological leadership with optical transmitters/receivers/transceivers for numerous optical applications, Sumitomo Electric accumulated shipping quantity exceeded 10 million units as of April of 2008, and continues to grow.
Sumitomo Electric established Sumitomo Electric Photo-Electronics Components (Suzhou), Ltd. (SPEC) in China in April 2007 in order to expand production capacity and shorten the lead time. SPEC started production of optical devices and transceivers in April 2008. As Sumitomo Electreic continues the production at the factories in Japan, the SPEC will increase production capacity by 50% by March of 2009.