Rockley Photonics showcases its in-packaged design at OFC

Rockley Photonics has showcased its in-packaged optics design to select customers and development partners at the OFC show being held in San Diego this week.

The packaged design includes Rockley's own 2 billion transistor layer 3 router chip, and its silicon photonics-based optical transceivers. The layer 3 router chip, described as a terabit device, also includes mixed-signal circuits needed for the optical transceevers' transmit and receive paths.

 Source: Rockley Photonics (annotated by Gazettabyte).

Rockley says it is using 500m-reach PSM4 transceivers for the design and that while a dozen ribbon cables are shown, this does not mean there are 12 100-gigabit PSM4 transceivers. The company is not saying what the total optical input-output is. 

Source: Rockley Photonics (annotated by Gazettabyte). 

The company has said it is not looking to enter the marketplace as a switch chip player competing with the likes of Broadcom, Intel, Cavium, Barefoot Networks and Innovium. To develop such a device and remain competitive requires considerable investment and that is not Rockley's focus. Instead, it is using its router chip as a demonstrator to show the marketplace what can be done and that the technology works.

When asked what progress Rockley is making showcasing its technology, its CEO Andrew Rickman said: “It is going very well but nothing we can say publicly."

The switch chip makers continue to use electrical interfaces for their state-of-the-art switches which have a capacity of 12.8 terabits. It still remains to be seen which generation of switch chip will finally adopt in-packaged optics and whether on-board optics designs such as COBO will be adopted first.

For the full interview with CEO Andrew Rickman, click here.