OFC/NFOEC 2010: Announcements round-up

A brief review of some of the eye-catching announcements emerging from this year’s OFC/NFOEC being held in San Diego this week.

The Infinera Express: Infinera's 80-foot-long truck-based mobile demo unit, is at OFC/NFOEC. Infinera is part of a demo of live 100 GigE data traffic with Juniper Networks, Finisar, Opnext and Reflex Photonics. The truck also contains Infinera’s ATN metro edge platform.

Demonstrations and displays

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) is displaying components and hardware as part of its integrated transmitter and receiver initiative for 100Gbps transponders.  OIF member companies taking part include Fujitsu Optical Components, NEC, NeoPhotonics, Opnext, Picometrix, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, TriQuint Semiconductor, u2t Photonics and Vitesse Semiconductor.

Opnext is demonstrating a real-time 100Gbps DWDM link using a single wavelength coherent receiver. This follows Opnext’s recent participation in AT&T’s 100Gbps trial. Opnext has already detailed its 100Gbps silicon germanium multiplexer IC and last week it announced it had partnered with A/D converter (ADC) specialist Mobius Semiconductor to develop a CMOS-based polarisation multiplexing quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK) receiver chip. The integrated circuit (IC) includes ADCs, a digital signal processor and forward error correction (FEC).

40 and 100Gbps line side transmission

Until recently, Nortel (acquired by Ciena) was the sole vendor with 40Gbps coherent technology. Last week Fujitsu announced that it has added 40Gbps coherent technology to its Flashwave 7500 platform. Now at OFC, CoreOptics has announced a 40Gbps coherent module and is demonstrating the technology with a Nokia Siemens Networks' system. CoreOptics claims its 40Gbps 300-pin MSA delivers a 2,000km reach without requiring dispersion compensation modules.

NeoPhotonics has announced integrated coherent receivers for 40 and 100Gbps. The receiver combines an integrated dual 90° hybrid coherent mixer with four balanced photodiodes and linear amplifiers in a package (see photonic integration feature).

There are also more 40Gbps DQPSK products being announced at OFC.

Opnext is showing its 40Gbps DQPSK 7x5inch transponder while u²t Photonics has unveiled its integrated DQPSK receiver which is now sampling. The company claims that integrating two balanced receivers in a single package saves up to 70% board space.

Oclaro last week announced that its 40Gbps DQPSK transponder had been qualified to Telcordia standards.

Lastly, Infinera has announced it has recruited John McNicol, a senior engineer involved in the development of Nortel’s coherent technology. “He will be critically involved in the development of Infinera’s next-generation optical networking systems,” says the firm, indicating Infinera’s intention to development a coherent-based system.

40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)

Transceiver firm ColorChip can claim a first by implementing the 40GBASE-LR4 standard in a QSFP module. The industry is working to decrease the size of the 40GbE modules. The first implementations use the CFP module while system vendors want smaller modules to increase the interfaces that can be placed on a card.

40GBASE-LR4 CFPs were first announced six months ago around ECOC 2009 and since then Hitachi Cable has developed a 40GBASE-LR4 X2 module. Now ColorChip has used its system-on-glass technology to squeeze the design into a QSFP. ColorChip has said it will deliver samples later this year with volume manufacturing beginning in 2011.

There is also an interoperability demonstration of 100GbE CFP modules involving Infinera, Juniper, Finisar and Opnext. The demonstration includes Juniper’s T1600 core router and Infinera’s DTN optical system and 100GBASE-LR4 modules from Finisar and Opnext. Reflex Photonics’ 100GBASE-SR10 CFP modules are also used as part of the demonstration.

Passive Optical Networks

NeoPhotonics has announced 10G PON transceivers for the GPON and EPON standards. The GPON pluggable transceivers supports 10Gbps in the downstream and 2.5Gbps burst mode transmission in the upstream with link budgets of 29 dB and 31 dB.  The EPON transceivers support 10Gbps in the downstream and 1Gbps in the upstream direction and have a link budget up to 30.5 dB. 

The GPON and EPON optical line terminal (OLT) transceivers used at the central office are implemented using the XFP while the optical networking unit (ONU) transceivers at a PON's end points are implemented using an SFP+ form factor. 

Parallel optics

Avago Technologies has announced a miniature 12-channel MicroPOD parallel optics transmitter and receiver modules that it is promoting as a follow-on to SNAP 12. The modules, measuring 7.8mm (L) by 8.2 mm (W) by 3.9mm (H), support lane rates of up to 12.5 Gbit per second for an aggregate bandwidth of 150Gbps. 

Avago claims the MicroPOD modules are compliant with the IBTA 12xQDR Infiniband and IEEE 802.3ba 100GBASE-SR10 specifications. Avago also announced it has developed with IBM new miniature low power 120Gbps 12-channel modules for IBM’s upcoming POWER7 supercomputing systems.

Luxtera is using OFC to demonstrate its OptoPHY board-mountable optical transceivers. The company’s CMOS-based optical engine is being shown supporting 40GbE.

Reflex Photonics has launched two surface-mount 12-channel optical engines. The LightABLE devices take up 2.3 cm² of board space and consume 42 mW of power per channel, transmitting or receiving at 120Gbps.

OFC tweets

To follow OFC/NFOEC on Twitter search on #ofcnfoec.

You can also follow analysts Andrew Schmitt of Infonetics (@aschmitt), Eve Griliches of ACG Research (@EveGr) and journalists Craig Matsumoto of Light Reading (@craigmatsumoto) and Stephen Hardy of Lightwave (@lightwaveonline).

Stephen Hardy also has an OFC show blog