OFC 2016: a sample of the technical paper highlights

Optical transmission technologies, Flexible Ethernet, software-defined networking, CFP2-ACOs and silicon photonics are just some of the topics at this year's OFC 2016 conference to be held in Anaheim, California between March 20th and 24th. 

Here is a small sample of the technical paper highlights being presented at the conference.

Doubling core network capacity 

Microsoft has conducted a study measuring the performance of its North American core backbone network to determine how the use of bandwidth-variable transceivers (BVTs) could boost capacity.

The highest capacity modulation scheme suited for each link from the choice of polarisation-multiplexed, quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK), polarisation-multiplexed, 8 quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-8QAM) and PM-16QAM can then be used.

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Silicon photonics adds off-chip comms to a RISC-V processor

A group of researchers have developed a microprocessor that uses silicon photonics-based optics to send and receive data.

"For the first time a system - a microprocessor - has been able to communicate with the external world using something other than electronics," says Vladimir Stojanovic, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Vladimir Stojanovic

The microprocessor is the result of work that started at MIT nearly a decade ago as part of a project sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate the integration of photonics and electronics for off-chip and even intra-chip communications.  

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Start-up Sicoya targets chip-to-chip interfaces

Sicoya has developed a tiny silicon photonics modulator which it is using to design chip-to-chip optical interfaces. The German start-up believes such optical chips - what it calls application-specific photonic integrated circuits or ASPICs - will be needed in the data centre, first for servers and then switches and routers.

“The trend we are seeing is the optics moving very close to the processor,” says Sven Otte, Sicoya’s CEO.

Sicoya was founded last year and raised €3.5 million ($3.9 million) towards the end of 2015. Many of the company’s dozen staff previously worked at the Technical University of Berlin. Sicoya expects to grow the company’s staff to 20 by the year end.  

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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.

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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.

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Books in 2015 - Part 2

More book recommendations - Part 2 

Yuriy Babenko, senior network architect, Deutsche Telekom

The books I particularly enjoyed in 2015 dealt with creativity, strategy, and social and organisational development.

People working in IT are often right-brained people; we try to make our decisions rationally, verifying hypotheses and build scenarios and strategies. An alternative that challenges this status quo and looks at issues from a different perspective is Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko.

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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.

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