Marvell's 50G PAM-4 DSP for 5G optical fronthaul

• Marvell has announced the first 50-gigabit 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) physical layer (PHY) for 5G fronthaul.

• The chip completes Marvell’s comprehensive portfolio for 5G radio access network (RAN) and x-haul (fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul).

Marvell's wireless portfolio of ICs. Source: Marvell.

Marvell has announced what it claims is an industry-first: a 50-gigabit PHY for the 5G fronthaul market.

Dubbed the AtlasOne, the PAM-4 PHY chip also integrates the laser driver. Marvell claims this is another first: implementing the directly modulated laser (DML) driver in CMOS.

“The common thinking in the industry has been that you couldn’t do a DML driver in CMOS due to the current requirements,” says Matt Bolig, director, product marketing, optical connectivity at Marvell. “What we have shown is that we can build that into CMOS.”

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Lumentum bulks up with NeoPhotonics buy

Lumentum is to acquire fellow component and module specialist, NeoPhotonics, for $918 million.

The deal will expand Lumentum’s optical transmission product line, broadening its component portfolio and boosting its high-end coherent line-side product offerings.

Vladimir Kozlov

Gaining NeoPhotonics' 400-gigabit coherent offerings will enable Lumentum to better compete with Cisco and Marvell. Lumentum will also gain a talented team of photonics experts as it looks to address new opportunities.

Alan Lowe, Lumentum’s president and CEO, stressed the importance of this collective optical expertise.

Speaking on the call announcing the agreement, Lowe said the expanded know-how would benefit Lumentum’s traditional markets and accelerate its entrance into other, newer markets.

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ADTRAN-ADVA's metro-access play

ADTRAN and ADVA have agreed to merge after a long courtship.

The two CEOs have spoken regularly over the years but several developments spurred them to act.

Tom Stanton, ADTRAN CEO

The merger combines ADTRAN’s expertise in access technologies with ADVA’s metro wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) know-how to create a ‘metro-core-to-door’ company with revenues of $1.2 billion.

As such, the merger promises to double their size and networking skills. Yet the stock market appeared underwhelmed by the announcement, with ADTRAN’s shares down 16% for the rest of the week after the deal was announced. 

Market research analysts, however, are more upbeat.

“ADTRAN and ADVA have a better path forward together than separately,” said John Lively, principal analyst at LightCounting Market Research, in a research note.

The deal is expected to close in the second or third quarter of 2022 but only after several hurdles are overcome in what is described as a complex deal.

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Marvell’s latest acquisition: switch-chip firm Innovium

• Innovium will be Marvell's fifth acquisition in four years  

Marvell is buying switch-chip maker, Innovium, for $1.1 billion to bolster its revenues from the lucrative data centre market.

Nariman Yousefi

The combination of Innovium with Inphi, Marvell’s most recent $10 billion acquisition, will enable the company to co-package optics alongside the high-bandwidth, low-latency switch chips.

“Inphi has quite a bit of experience shipping silicon photonics with the ColorZ and ColorZ II [modules],” says Nariman Yousefi, executive vice president, automotive, coherent DSP and switch group at Marvell. “And we have programmes inside the company to do co-packaged optics as well.”

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Open Eye MSA gets webscale attention

Microsoft has trialled optical modules that use signalling technology developed by the Open Eye Consortium.

The webscale player says optical modules using the Open Eye’s analogue 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) technology consume less power than modules with a PAM-4 digital signal processor (DSP).

“Open Eye has shown us at least an ability that we can do better on power,” says Brad Booth, director, next cloud system architecture, Azure hardware systems and infrastructure at Microsoft, during an Open Eye webinar.

Brad BoothOptical module power consumption is a key element of the total power budget of data centres that can have as many as 100,000 servers and 50,000 switches.

“You want to avoid running past your limit because then you have to build another data centre,” says Booth.

But challenges remain before Open Eye becomes a mainstream technology, says Dale Murray, principal analyst at market research firm, LightCounting.

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Optical supply chain set to withstand the COVID-19 crisis

The optical supply chain will not experience any lasting damage as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. So argues LightCounting in a research note.   

John LivelyThe market research company notes how the experience of the Coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the many benefits of the digital economy.

And the jolt the world is experiencing will if anything, strengthen it.

“All kind of things are happening as a result of the pandemic,” says John Lively, principal analyst at LightCounting and author of the research note. “Telecommuting, telelearning and telemedicine have all been used before, but never on a scale like this.”  

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Hyperscaler or ICP?

Several terms are commonly used when referring to leading internet companies, those that operate large-scale data centres and typically are household names.

Terms used include internet content providers (ICP), hyperscalers and mega data centre operators. Meanwhile, a leading system vendor, in a briefing, referred to ‘global content providers’.  

The terms are used interchangeably but, not surprisingly, there are differences.

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