High fives: 5 Terabit OTN switching and 500 Gig super-channels.

Infinera has announced a core network platform that combines Optical Transport Network (OTN) switching with dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) transport. "We are looking at a system that integrates two layers of the network," says Mike Capuano, vice president of corporate marketing at Infinera. 

"This is 100Tbps of non-blocking switching, all functioning as one system. You just can't do that with merchant silicon."

Mike Capuano, Infinera 

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100 Gigabit for the metro

ADVA Optical Networking has launched a 100 Gigabit transmission card designed for metro wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) applications.

The firm claims this is an industry first: a direct-detection-based 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) design using four, 28Gbps channels rather than current 10x10Gbps schemes.

"Data centre operators want to make best use of the fibre insfrastructure and get lower overall cost, footprint and power consumption"

Jörg-Peter Elbers, ADVA Optical Networking

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R&D: At home or abroad?

ECI Telecom chose to set up its latest R&D site in Israel. Gazettabyte met with Chaim Urbach, ECI’s head of global R&D operations, to discuss why it decided to locate its latest site in Israel, and how the company can compete with the leading telecom players that have considerably larger R&D teams and budgets.

Omer Industrial Park in the Negev, Israel; the location of ECI Telecom's latest R&D centre.

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Terabit Consortium embraces OFDM

A project to develop optical networks using terabit light paths has been announced by a consortium of Israeli companies and universities. The Tera Santa Consortium will spend 3-5 years developing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based terabit optical networking equipment.

“This project is very challenging and very important”

Shai Stein, Tera Santa Consortium

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Optical engines bring Terabit bandwidth on a card

Avago Technologies is now delivering to customers its 120 Gigabit-per-second optical engine devices. 

Such a parallel optics design offer several advantages when used on a motherboard. It offer greater flexibility when cooling since traditional optics are normally in pluggable slots at the card edge, furthest away from the fans. Such optical engines also simplify high-speed signal routing and electromagnetic interference issues since fibre is used rather than copper traces.

Figure 1: Fourteen 120Gbps MiniPods on a board. Source: Avago Technologies

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OFC announcements and market trends

Avago Technologies, Finisar and Opnext spoke to Gazettabyte about market trends and their recent OFC/NFOEC announcements. 

More compact transceiver designs at 10, 40 and 100 Gigabit, advancements in reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) technology and parallel optical engine developments were all in evidence at this year’s OFC/NFOEC show held in Los Angeles in March.

“MSAs are designed by committee, and when you have a committee you throw away innovation and you throw away time-to-market”  

Victor Krutul, Avago Technologies

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Infinera details Terabit PICs, 5x100G devices set for 2012

What has been announced?

Infinera has detailed Terabit coherent detection photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The pair - a transmitter and a receiver PIC – implement a ten-channel 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) link using polarisation multiplexing quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK). The Infinera development work was describe in papers given at the OFC/NFOEC event held in Los Angeles.

Infinera recently demonstrated its 5x100Gbps PIC carrying traffic within Interoute Communications’ network. The 5x100Gbps PIC-based system will be available commercially in 2012.

 

“We think we can drive the system from where it is today – 8 Terabits-per-fibre - to around 25 Terabits-per-fibre”

Dave Welch, Infinera 

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