ST makes its first PSM4 optical engine deliveries

Flavio Benetti is upbeat about the prospects of silicon photonics. “Silicon photonics as a market is at a turning point this year,” he says.

What gives Benetti confidence is the demand he is seeing for 100-gigabit transceivers in the data centre. “From my visibility today, the tipping point is 2016,” says Benetti, group vice president and general manager, digital and mixed processes ASIC division at STMicroelectronics.

Flavio Benetti

Benetti and colleagues at ST have spent the last four years working to bring to market the silicon photonics technology that the chip company licensed from Luxtera.

Click to read more ...

FPGAs with 56-gigabit transceivers set for 2017

Xilinx is expected to ship its first FPGAs featuring 56-gigabit transceivers next year. 

The company demonstrated a 56-gigabit transceiver using 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) at the recent OFC show. The 56-gigabit transceiver, also referred to as a serialiser-deserialiser (serdes), was shown successfully working over backplane specified for 25-gigabit signalling only.

Gilles GarciaXilinx's 56-gigabit serdes is implemented using a 16nm CMOS process node but the first FPGAs featuring the design will be made using a 7nm process. Gilles Garcia says the choice of 7nm CMOS is solely a business decision and not a technical one.

”Optical module [makers] will take another year to make something decent using PAM-4," says Garcia, Xilinx's director marketing and business development, wired communications. "Our 7nm FPGAs will follow very soon afterwards.”

Click to read more ...

Enabling coherent optics down to 2km short-reach links

Silicon photonics luminaries series

Interview 5: Chris Doerr

Chris Doerr admits he was a relative latecomer to silicon photonics. But after making his first silicon photonics chip, he was hooked. Nearly a decade later and Doerr is associate vice president of integrated photonics at Acacia Communications. The company uses silicon photonics for its long-distance optical coherent transceivers.

Chris Doerr in the lab

Acacia Communications made headlines in May after completing an initial public offering (IPO), raising approximately $105 million for the company. Technology company IPOs have become a rarity and are not always successful. On its first day of trading, Acacia’s shares opened at $29 per share and closed just under $31.

Click to read more ...

NeoPhotonics showcases a CFP2-ACO roadmap to 400G

NeoPhotonics has begun sampling its CFP2-ACO, a pluggable module for metro and long-haul optical transport. 

The company demonstrated the CFP2-ACO module transmitting at 100 gigabit using polarisation multiplexed, quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK) modulation at the recent OFC show. The line-side module is capable of transmitting over 1,000km and also supports PM-16QAM that doubles capacity over metro network distances.

Ferris LipscombThe CFP2-ACO is a Class 3 design: the control electronics for the modulator and laser reside on the board, alongside the coherent DSP-ASIC chip.

At OFC, NeoPhotonics also demonstrated single-wavelength 400-gigabit transmission using more advanced modulation and a higher symbol rate, and a short-reach 100-gigabit link for inside the data centre using 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) signalling. 

Click to read more ...

The white box concept gets embraced at the optical layer

Lumentum has unveiled several optical white-box designs. To date the adoption of white boxes - pizza-box sized platforms used in large-scale data centres - has been at the electronic layer, for switching and routing applications.

Brandon Collings

White boxes have arisen to satisfy the data centre operators’ need for simple building-block functions in large number that they can direct themselves.  

“They [data centre operators] started using very simple white boxes - rather simple functionality, much simpler than the large router companies were providing - which they controlled themselves using software-defined networking orchestrators,” says Brandon Collings, CTO of Lumentum. 

Click to read more ...

QSFP28 MicroMux expands 10 & 40 Gig faceplate capacity

• ADVA Optical Networking's MicroMux aggregates lower rate 10 and 40 gigabit client signals in a pluggable QSFP28 module
• ADVA is also claiming an industry first in implementing the Open Optical Line System concept that is backed by Microsoft 

The need for terabits of capacity to link Internet content providers’ mega-scale data centres has given rise to a new class of optical transport platform, known as data centre interconnect.

Source: ADVA Optical Networking

Such platforms are designed to be power efficient, compact and support a variety of client-side signal rates spanning 10, 40 and 100 gigabit. But this poses a challenge for design engineers as the front panel of such platforms can only fit so many lower-rate client-side signals. This can lead to the aggregate data fed to the platform falling short of its full line-side transport capability.

Click to read more ...

Infinera goes multi-terabit with its latest photonic IC

In his new book, The Great Acceleration, Robert Colvile discusses how things we do are speeding up.

In 1845 it took U.S. President James Polk six months to send a message to California. Just 15 years later Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address could travel the same distance in under eight days, using the Pony Express. But the use of ponies for transcontinental communications was shortlived once the electrical telegraph took hold. [1]

The relentless progress in information transfer, enabled by chip advances and Moore's law, is taken largely for granted. Less noticed is the progress being made in integrated photonic chips, most notably by Infinera.    

Click to read more ...