MultiPhy raises $17M to develop 100G serial interfaces

Start-up MultiPhy has raised U.S. $17 million to develop 100-gigabit single-wavelength technology for the data centre. Semtech has announced it is one of the companies backing the Israeli fabless start-up, the rest coming from venture capitalists and at least one other company.

MultiPhy is developing chips to support serial 100-gigabit-per-second transmission using 25-gigabit optical components. The design will enable short reach links within the data centre and up to 80km point-to-point links for data centre interconnect. 

Source: MultiPhy

“It is not the same chip [for the two applications] but the same technology core,” says Avi Shabtai, the CEO of MultiPhy. The funding will be used to bring products to market as well as expand the company’s marketing arm.

Click to read more ...

Arista adds coherent CFP2 modules to its 7500 switch

Arista Networks has developed a coherent optical transport line card for its 7500 high-end switch series. The line card hosts six 100 gigabit CFP2-ACO (analogue coherent optics) and has a reach of up to 5,000 km.

Martin Hull

Several optical equipment makers have announced ‘stackable’ platforms specifically to link data centres in the last year.

Infinera’s Cloud Xpress was the first while Coriant recently detailed its Groove G30 platform. Arista’s announcement offers data centre managers an alternative to such data centre interconnect platforms by adding dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) optics directly onto its switch. 

Click to read more ...

SDM and MIMO: An interview with Bell Labs

Bell Labs is claiming an industry first in demonstrating the recovery in real time of multiple signals sent over spatial-division multiplexed fibre. Gazettabyte spoke to two members of the research team to understand more.

Part 2: The capacity crunch and the role of SDM

The argument for spatial-division multiplexing (SDM) - the sending of optical signals down parallel fibre paths, whether multiple modes, cores or fibres - is the coming ‘capacity crunch’. The information-carrying capacity limit of fibre, for so long described as limitless, is being approached due to the continual yearly high growth in IP traffic. But if there is a looming capacity crunch, why are we not hearing about it from the world’s leading telcos? 

Click to read more ...

Coriant's 134 terabit data centre interconnect platform

Coriant is the latest optical networking equipment maker to unveil a data centre interconnect product. The company claims its Groove G30 platform is the industry’s highest capacity, most power efficient design. 

“We have several customers that have either purpose-built data centre interconnect networks or have data centre interconnect as a key application riding on top of their metro or long-haul networks,” says Jean-Charles Fahmy, vice president of cloud and data centre at Coriant.

Jean-Charles Fahmy

Each card in the platform is one rack unit (1RU) high and has a total capacity of 3.2 terabit-per-second, while the full G30 rack supports 42 such cards for a total platform capacity of 134 terabits. The G30's power consumption equates to 0.45W-per-gigabit.

The card supports up to 1.6 terabit line-side capacity and up to 1.6 terabit of client side interfaces. The card can hold eight silicon photonics-based CFP2-ACO (analogue coherent optics) line-side pluggables. For the client-side optics, 16, 100 gigabit QSFP28 modules can be used or 20 QSFP+ modules that support 40 or 4x10 gigabit rates.

Click to read more ...

Mellanox Technologies to acquire EZchip for $811M

Mellanox Technologies plans to acquire networking chip company EZchip Semiconductor in a deal worth U.S. $811 million.

Eyal Waldman

Mellanox makes InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnection platforms and products for the data centre while EZchip sells network and multi-core processors that are used in carrier edge routers and enterprise platforms.

EZchip’s customers include Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, Oracle, Avaya and Cisco Systems.

“Mellanox needs to diversify its business; it is still heavily dependent on the high-performance computing market and InfiniBand,” says Bob Wheeler, principal analyst, networking at market research firm The Linley Group. “EZchip helps move Mellanox into markets and customers that it would not have access to with its existing products.”

Click to read more ...

Ciena's stackable platform for data centre interconnect

Ciena is the latest system vendor to unveil its optical transport platform for the burgeoning data centre interconnect market. Data centre operators require scalable platforms that can carry significant amounts of traffic to link sites over metro and long-haul distances, and are power efficient. 

The Waveserver stackable interconnect system delivers 800 Gig traffic throughput in a 1 rack unit (1RU) form factor. The throughput comprises 400 Gigabit of client-side interfaces and 400 Gigabit coherent dense WDM transport. 

Click to read more ...