Talking markets: Oclaro on 100 gigabits and beyond

Oclaro’s chief commercial officer, Adam Carter, discusses the 100-gigabit market, optical module trends, silicon photonics, and why this is a good time to be an optical component maker.

Oclaro has started its first quarter 2017 fiscal results as it ended fiscal year 2016 with another record quarter. The company reported revenues of $136 million in the quarter ending in September, 8 percent sequential growth and the company's fifth consecutive quarter of 7 percent or greater revenue growth.

Adam CarterA large part of Oclaro’s growth was due to strong demand for 100 gigabits across the company’s optical module and component portfolio.

The company has been supplying 100-gigabit client-side optics using the CFP, CFP2 and CFP4 pluggable form factors for a while. “What we saw in June was the first real production ramp of our CFP2-ACO [coherent] module,” says Adam Carter, chief commercial officer at Oclaro. “We have transferred all that manufacturing over to Asia now.”

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600-gigabit channels on a fibre by 2017

NeoPhotonics has announced an integrated coherent receiver that will enable 600-gigabit optical transmission using a single wavelength. A transmission capacity of 48 terabits over the fibre’s C-band is then possible using 80 such channels.

NeoPhotonics’ micro integrated coherent receiver operates at 64 gigabaud, twice the symbol rate of deployed 100-gigabit optical transport systems and was detailed at the recent ECOC show.

Current 100 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) coherent systems use polarisation-multiplexing, quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK) modulation operating at 32 gigabaud. “That is how you get four bits [per symbol],” says Ferris Lipscomb, vice president of marketing at NeoPhotonics.

Optical designers have two approaches to increase the data transmitted on a wavelength: they can use increasingly complex modulation schemes - such as 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) or 64-QAM - and they can increase the baud rate. “You double the baud rate, you double the transmission capacity,” says Lipscomb. “And using 64-QAM and 64 gigabaud, you can go to 600 gigabit per channel; of course when you do that, you reduce the reach.”

The move to the higher 64 gigabaud symbol rate will help Internet content providers increase capacity between their large-scale data centres. Typical transmission distances between sites are relatively short, up to 100km.

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Ranovus shows 200 gigabit direct detection at ECOC

Ranovus has announced it first direct-detection optical products for applications including data centre interconnect.

Saeid AramidehThe start-up has announced two products to coincide with this week’s ECOC show being held in Dusseldorf, Germany.

One product is a 200 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) dense wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) CFP2 pluggable optical module that spans distances up to 130km. Ranovus will also sell the 200Gbps transmitter and receiver optical engines that can be integrated by vendors onto a host line card. 

The dense WDM direct-detection solution from Ranovus is being positioned as a cheaper, lower-power alternative to coherent optics used for high-capacity metro and long-haul optical transport. Using such technology, service providers can link their data centre buildings distributed across a metro area. 

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