Nokia jumps a class with its PSE-6s coherent modem

• The 130 gigabaud (GBd) PSE-6s coherent modem is Nokia's first in-house design for high-end optical transport systems 
• The PSE-6s can send an 800 gigabit Ethernet (800GbE) payload over 2,000km and 1.2 terabits of data over 100km.
• Two PSE-6s DSPs can send three 800GbE signals over two 1.2-terabit wavelengths

Nokia has unveiled its latest coherent modem, the super coherent Photonic Service Engine 6s (PSE-6s) that will power its optical transport platforms in the coming years.

The PSE-6s comes three years after Nokia announced its current generation of coherent digital signal processors (DSPs): the PSE-Vs DSP for the long-haul and the compact PSE-Vc for the coherent pluggable market.

Nokia is only detailing the PSE-6s; its next-generation coherent modem for pluggables will be a future announcement.

Nokia will demonstrate the PSE-6s at the upcoming OFC show in March while field trials involving systems using the PSE-6s will start in the year's second half. 

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How to shepherd a company’s technologies for growth

CTO interviews part 3: Dr Julie Eng

• Eng is four months into her new role as CTO of Coherent.
• Previously, she headed Finisar’s transceiver business and then the 3D sensing business, first at Finisar and then at II-VI. II-VI changed its name to Coherent in September 2022
• “CTO is one of these roles that has no universal definition,” says Eng

Dr Julie Eng

Julie Eng loved her previous role.

She had been heading II-VI’s (now Coherent’s) 3D sensing unit after being VP of engineering at Finisar’s transceiver business. II-VI bought Finisar in 2019.

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Tencent makes its co-packaged optics move

• Tencent is the first hyperscaler to announce it is deploying a co-packaged optics switch chip

• Tencent will use Broadcom’s Humboldt that combines its 25.6-terabit Tomahawk 4 switch chip with four optical engines, each 3.2 terabit-per-second (Tbps)

Part 2: Broadcom's co-packaged optics 

Tencent will use Broadcom’s Tomahawk 4 switch chip co-packaged with optics for its data centres.

Manish Mehta

“We are now partnered with the hyperscaler to deploy this in a network,” says Manish Mehta, vice president of marketing and operations optical systems division, Broadcom. “This is a huge step for co-packaged optics overall.”

The Chinese hyperscaler will use Broadcom’s 25.6Tbps Tomahawk 4 Humboldt, a hybrid design where half of the chip’s input-output (I/O) is optical and half is the chip’s serialisers-deserialisers (serdes) that connect to pluggable modules on the switch’s front panel.

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OpenLight's integrated-laser silicon photonics platform

• OpenLight is an independent silicon photonics company backed by Synopsys and Juniper Networks 
• The company was created by carving out the silicon photonics arm of Juniper
• The establishment of OpenLight and its open platform highlights the growing maturity of silicon photonics as new applications emerge beyond datacom and telecom

Thomas Mader, OpenLight

OpenLight is coming to market with an open silicon photonics platform that includes integrated lasers and gain blocks.

Juniper has a long relationship with Synopsys, using its electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) tools.

So when Juniper said it was spinning out its silicon photonics group, Synopsys was keen to partner.

The result is OpenLight, of which Synopsys has a 75 per cent stake costing $67.5 million.

Thomas Mader, OpenLight's chief operating officer and formerly head of Juniper's silicon photonics unit, says OpenLight is the first company to offer an open platform that includes monolithically integrated lasers, optical amplifiers and modulators. 

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Intel adds multi-channel lasers to its silicon photonics toolbox

Intel has developed an 8-lane parallel-wavelength laser array to tackle the growing challenge of feeding data to integrated circuits (ICs). 

Haisheng Rong

Optical input-output (I/O) promises to solve the challenge of getting data into and out of high-end silicon devices. 

These ICs include Ethernet switch chips and 'XPUs', shorthand for processors (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs) and data processor units (DPUs).

The laser array is Intel's latest addition to its library of silicon photonics devices. 

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II-VI’s VCSEL approach for co-packaged optics

Co-packaged optics was a central theme at this year’s OFC show, held in San Diego. But the solutions detailed were primarily using single-mode lasers and fibre.

Vipul Bhatt

The firm II-VI is beating a co-packaged optics path using vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) and multi-mode fibre while also pursuing single-mode, silicon photonics-based co-packaged optics.   

For multi-mode, VCSEL-based co-packaging, II-VI is working with IBM, a collaboration that started as part of a U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) project to promote energy-saving technologies.

II-VI claims there are significant system benefits using VCSEL-based co-packaged optics. The benefits include lower power, cost and latency when compared with pluggable optics.

The two key design decisions that achieved power savings are the elimination of the retimer chip - also known as a direct-drive or linear interface - and the use of VCSELs.

The approach - what II-VI calls shortwave co-packaged optics - integrates the VCSELs, chip and optics in the same package.

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Building an AI supercomputer using silicon photonics

•  Luminous Computing is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer 

Silicon photonics is now mature enough to be used to design complete systems.

So says Michael Hochberg (pictured), who has been behind four start-ups including Luxtera and Elenion whose products used the technology. Hochberg has also co-authored a book along with Lukas Chrostowski on silicon photonics design.

In the first phase of silicon photonics, from 2000 to 2010, people wondered whether they could even do a design using the technology.

“Almost everything that was being done had to fit into an existing socket that could be served by some other material system,” says Hochberg.

A decade later it was more the case that sockets couldn’t be served without using silicon photonics. “Silicon photonics had dominated every one of the transceiver verticals that matter: intra data centre, data centre interconnect, metro and long haul,” he says.

Now people have started betting their systems using silicon photonics, says Hochberg, citing the examples as lidar, quantum optics, co-packaged optics and biosensing.

Several months ago Hochberg joined as president of Luminous Computing, a start-up that recently came out of stealth mode after raising $105 million in Series A funding.

Luminous is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer that it believes will significantly outperform existing platforms.

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