Sumitomo Electric Industries announced that, as of April, it had shipped more than 10 million units of its optical transmitters/receivers/transceivers. The company manufactures and sells optical fiber, cable and components, advanced electronic devices, and automotive parts.

 

Optical cable became popular in the United States as early as the 1980s. However, back then there were no standards set for optical local area networks (LANs). In order to standardize the optical cable industry, American National Standard Institute (ANSI) established Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), which is now accepted as the worldwide standard of 125Mb/s optical LAN with the maximum transmission distance of 2km over multi mode fiber.

 

Sumitomo Electric (News - Alert) embarked develops FDDI transceivers with the help of its subsidiaries in the United States. With the use of lasers and detectors capable of operating 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. The FDDI transceivers have been delivered to key FDDI LAN equipment suppliers all over the world.

 

In 1988, International Telecommunication Unit (ITU) introduced a new standard —  Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) — for public communication systems using single mode fiber. This created a sudden demand for single mode fiber. 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.

 

In April 2007, Sumitomo Electric established Sumitomo Electric Photo-Electronics Components (Suzhou), (SPEC) in China in April 2007 in order to expand production capacity and shorten the lead-time. The production of optical devices at SPEC started in April 2008. Sumitomo expects that SPEC will increase production capacity by 50 percent by March of 2009.

 

Sumitomo Electric Industries currently operates in more than 30 countries.