Abstract.A novel 10-Gbps bidirectional optical subassembly (BOSA) comprised of a 1577 nm electroabsorptive modulated laser (EML) transmitter optical subassembly (TOSA) and 1270 nm avalanche photodiode (APD) receiver optical subassembly (ROSA) was developed. Here, a 10-Gbps microdevice compatible two-window flat package was proposed to simplify the EML BOSA structure, considering both the mechanical reliability and cooling performance. As a result, an optical output power of 8 dBm was obtained due to a high optical coupling efficiency of 60%, an extinction ratio of 7 dB, and a dispersion penalty at 20 km transmission of less than 1.5 dB for the EML TOSA. The APD ROSA sensitivity was -21.5 dBm at a bit error rate (BER) of 10 − 12 and -27 dBm at a BER of 10 − 3 without forward error correction. In addition, the sensitivity penalty of the APD ROSA due to signal crosstalk was less than 1.2 dB. C 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).