Kim Roberts: The 2019 John Tyndall Award winner

A Profile

A conceptualiser, mathematician, furniture maker, prolific inventor, sushi lover, creative spirit, team leader and mentor. These are just some of the descriptors applied to Kim Roberts of Ciena by the people that know him. 

Kim Roberts of Ciena. On the wall are some of his 160 patents while on the screen is an image of a 32-point constellation produced by the WaveLogic Ai coherent modem. Source: Ciena.

Roberts has been awarded the 2019 John Tyndall Award by The Optical Society (OSA) and the IEEE Photonics Society in recognition of his “pioneering contributions to the development of practical coherent communication systems”.

“It is well deserved,” says Seb Savory, who first knew Roberts when they both worked at Nortel and who is now an academic at the University of Cambridge working on joint projects with Ciena. Ciena acquired Nortel in 2010.

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Ciena to sell its own coherent modules

The systems vendor is expanding its offerings to include WaveLogic modem chips and coherent optical modules.

Ciena is developing its own coherent modules to sell to the telecom and datacom markets. 

The system vendor has set up the Optical Microsystems Division business unit to promote its WaveLogic coherent modem technology to the marketplace. Until now it has licensed its WaveLogic Ai digital signal processor (DSP) to module makers Lumentum, NeoPhotonics and Oclaro. But now it is planning to sell its own coherent modules.

In a job advert for a head of sales channel development, Ciena says the Optical Microsystems Division's goal is ‘to develop and productize electro-optic components and modules for sale to global systems integrator customers to be incorporated in their products for sale to telecom and data network customers’.

And at the recent European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) held in Rome, a network equipment manufacturer said it was approached by Ciena enquiring if it was interested in buying coherent modules from the company.

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Ciena launches the 8700 metro Ethernet-over-WDM platform

• The 8700 Packetwave is an Ethernet-over-DWDM platform 
• The 8700 is claimed to deliver double the Ethernet density while halving the power consumption and space required.

Source: Ciena

Ciena has launched the 8700 Packetwave platform that combines high-capacity Ethernet switching with 100 Gigabit coherent optical transmission.

The platform is designed to cater for the significant growth in metro traffic, estimated at between 30 and 50 percent each year, and the ongoing shift from legacy to Ethernet services.

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The capacity limits facing optical networking

Ever wondered just how close systems vendors are in approaching the limits of fibre capacity in optical networks? Kim Roberts, senior director coherent systems at Ciena, adds some mathematical rigour with his explanation of Shannon's bound, from a workshop he gave at the recent Layer123's Terabit Optical and Data Networking conference held in Cannes. 

Part 1 Shannon's bound

 Source: Ciena

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