What is XFP Transceiver Module?

by Xiqing Zhang SEO

XFP is short for 10 Gigabit small form factor pluggable. It is a standard for transceivers for high-speed computer network and telecommunication links that use optical fiber. It is protocol-independent and fully compliant to the following standards: 10G Ethernet, 10G Fibre Channel, SONET OC-192, SDH STM-64 and OTN G.709, supporting bit rate from 9.95G through 11.3G, along with its interface to other electrical components which is called XFI. The 10-Gigabit XFP transceiver module is a hot-swappable I/O device that plugs into 10-Gigabit ports. The XFP transceiver module connects the electrical circuitry of the system with the optical network.

Standard

The XFI electrical interface specification was a 10 gigabit per second chip-to-chip electrical interface specification defined as part of the XFP multi-source agreement. It was also developed by the XFP MSA group. XFI provides a single lane running at 10.3125 Gbit/s when using a 64B/66B encoding scheme. A serializer/deserializer is often used to convert from a wider interface such as XAUI that has four lanes running at 3.125 Gbit/s using 8B/10B encoding. XFI is sometimes pronounced as “X” “F” “I” and other times as “ziffie”.

Types

XFP transceivers comply with the XFP multi source agreement developed by several leading companies in this industry. Typical types for XFP including the SR, LR, ER and ZR. XFP SR working distance is 300 meters max, it works with OM3 10GB multimode optical fiber. The other 3 types work with single mode fiber, XFP LR max distance is 10km, XFP ER is 40km, and XFP ZR max working span is 80km via SMF. XFP is regarded to be the new generation 10G solution after the Xenpak and X2 transceivers, many companies have developed the XFP 10G transceivers nowadays.