Be the LabMaster 65 GHz bethelabmaster. com FEATURE Annual technology forecast 2013 HIGH- SPEED TRANSMISSION applications continued to dominate R& D spending at many technology developers in 2012, and test equipment manufacturers reacted accordingly. Instruments for coherent transmission test and measurement applications provided the most salient example, with oscilloscope purveyors playing “ Can You Top This?” with each new bandwidth claim. It would appear that technology developers have access to test equipment with enough bandwidth to meet their foreseeable needs, sources at one test vendor recently told Lightwave . Now what they want is price reduction. Such lower costs not only would be nice for R& D applications; they will be essential for coherent technology manufacturing and potential field test requirements. In particular, 2013 should be the year someone from the coherent- analyzer community unveils a unit designed for field use. Back in the lab, this year saw several test vendors offer 32G bit- error- rate test ( BERT) capabilities, especially for emerging 4 × 25- Gbps requirements. With 400 Gbps looking like the next step in Ethernet’s evolution, thoughts have already begun to turn to what the necessary electrical interfaces would need to be to support such a data rate. A paper at ECOC suggested 16 × 25G for the first generation, with 8 × 50G offered for a CFP2 equivalent and 4 × 100G following. So it would seem innovation in BERT for parallel applications will have to continue. In the field, it will be interesting to see how well carriers take to Alcatel- Lucent’s announcement of integrated optical time domain reflectometry capabilities in its GPON equipment. Sources have already indicated that systems houses have integrated measurement capabilities for turn- up of 100- Gbps wavelengths. With test capabilities now appearing in PON systems, we have to wonder how many types of network systems will appear with integrated test capabilities that obviate the need for standalone instruments. Taming the price of test ________________________