Ciena shops for photonic technology for line-side edge

Briefing: DWDM developments

Part 3: Acquisitions and silicon photonics

Ciena is to acquire the high-speed photonics components division of Teraxion for $32 million. The deal includes 35 employees and Teraxion’s indium phosphide and silicon photonics technologies. The systems vendor is making the acquisition to benefit its coherent-based packet-optical transmission systems in metro and long-haul networks.

Sterling Perrin

“Historically Ciena has been a step ahead of others in introducing new coherent capabilities to the market,” says Ron Kline, principal analyst, intelligent networks at market research company, Ovum. “The technology is critical to own if they want to maintain their edge.”

“Bringing in-house not everything, just piece parts, are becoming differentiators,” says Sterling Perrin, senior analyst at Heavy Reading.    

Ciena designs its own WaveLogic coherent DSP-ASICs but buys its optical components. Having its own photonics design team with expertise in indium-phosphide and silicon photonics will allow Ciena to develop complete line-side systems, optimising the photonics and electronics to benefit system performance.

Owning both the photonics and optics also promises to reduce power consumption and improve line-side port density.

“These assets will give us greater control of a critical roadmap component for the advancement of those coherent solutions,” a Ciena spokesperson told Gazettabyte. “These assets will give us greater control of a critical enabling technology to accelerate the pace of our innovation and speed our time-to-market for key packet-optical solutions.” 

Ciena have always been do-it-yourself when it comes to optics, and it is an area where they has a huge heritage. So it is an interesting admission that they need somebody else to help them.

The OME 6500 packet optical platform remains a critical system for Ciena in terms of revenues, according to a recent report from the financial analyst firm, Jefferies.

Ciena have always been do-it-yourself when it comes to optics, and it is an area where they have a huge heritage, says Perrin: “So it is an interesting admission that they need somebody else to help them.” It is the silicon photonics technology not just photonic integration that is of importance to Ciena, he says.

Coherent competition

Infinera, which designs its own photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and coherent DSP-ASIC, recently detailed its next-generation coherent toolkit prior to the launch of its terabit PIC and coherent DSP-ASIC. The toolkit uses sub-carriers, parallel processing soft-decision forward-error correction (SD-FEC) and enhanced modulation techniques. These improvements reflect the tighter integration between photonics and electronics for optical transport.

Cisco Systems is another system vendor that develops its own coherent ASICs and has silicon photonics expertise with its Lightwire acquisition in 2012, as does Coriant which works with strategic partners while using merchant coherent processors. Huawei has photonic integration expertise with its acquisitions of indium phosphide UK specialist CIP Technologies in 2012 and Belgian silicon photonics start-up Caliopa in 2013. 

Cisco may have started the ball rolling when they acquired silicon photonics start-up Lightwire, and at the time they were criticised for doing so, says Perrin: “This [Ciena move] seems to be partially a response, at least a validation, to what Cisco did, bringing that in-house.”

Optical module maker Acacia also has silicon photonics and DSP-ASIC expertise. Acacia has launched 100 gigabit and 200-400 gigabit CFP optical modules that use silicon photonics.      

Companies like Coriant and lots of mid-tier players can use Acacia and rely on the expertise the start-up is driving in photonic integration on the line side, says Perrin. ”Now Ciena wants to own the whole thing which, to me, means they need to move more rapidly, probably driven by the Acacia development.”

Teraxion

Ciena has been working with Canadian firm Teraxion for a long time and the two have a co-development agreement, says Perrin.

Teraxion was founded in 2000 during the optical boom, specialising in dispersion compensation modules and fibre Bragg gratings. In recent years, it has added indium-phosphide and silicon photonics expertise and in 2013 acquired Cogo Optronics, adding indium-phosphide modulator technology.

Teraxion detailed an indium phosphide modulator suited to 400 gigabit at ECOC 2015. Teraxion said at the time that it had demonstrated a 400-gigabit single-wavelength transmission over 500km using polarisation-multiplexed, 16-QAM (PM-16QAM), operating at a symbol rate of 56 gigabaud. 

It also has a coherent receiver technology implemented using silicon photonics.

The remaining business of Teraxion covers fibre-optic communication, fibre lasers and optical-sensing applications which employs 120 staff will continue in Québec City.