Growth Is Forecast for Laser Markets

The $1 billion market for telecom and datacom lasers will grow to nearly $2.9 billion by 2012, according to a report prepared by CIR Inc. of Glen Allen, Va.

Several factors will drive the growth, including the replacement of copper by optics in many networks. Additionally, storage networks are transitioning from copper to fiber, 10 GigE is the first Ethernet that is predominantly optical, and FTTx is bringing optics to the residential access network for the first time.

The market for telecom and datacom lasers is projected to nearly triple in the next five years, according to a report prepared by CIR Inc. Courtesy of CIR.

The market report also concludes that the use of tunable lasers will continue to expand, reaching $870 million in sales by 2012. The cost of these lasers, meanwhile, is expected to drop as volume increases and cost-effective designs based on distributed Bragg reflector lasers and integrated modulators are used.

More broadly, the report predicts that the rise of silicon photonics could result in the extinction of multimode fiber. Silicon photonics promises long-wavelength transceivers for the same cost as 850-nm optics. The company also predicts that parallelism may be the optics of the future, dominating short-reach computing center interconnects and, eventually, LX4-type transponders for 100 GigE markets.