COBO acts to bring optics closer to the chip

The formation of the Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) highlights how, despite engineers putting high-speed optics into smaller and smaller pluggable modules, further progress in interface compactness is needed.

The goal of COBO, announced at the OFC 2015 show and backed by such companies as Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Finisar and Intel, is to develop a technology roadmap and common specifications for on-board optics to ensure interoperability.

“The Microsoft initiative is looking at the next wave of innovation as it relates to bringing optics closer to the CPU,” says Saeid Aramideh, co-founder and chief marketing and sales officer for start-up Ranovus, one of the founding members of COBO. “There are tremendous benefits for such an architecture in terms of reducing power dissipation and increasing the front panel density.”

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Ranovus readies its interfaces for deployment

• Products will be deployed in the first half of 2015
• Ranovus has raised US $24 million in a second funding round
• The start-up is a co-founder of the OpenOptics MSA; Oracle is now also an MSA member.

Ranovus says its interconnect products will be deployed in the first half of 2015. The start-up, which is developing WDM-based interfaces for use in and between data centres, has raised US $24 million in a second stage funding round. The company first raised $11 million in September 2013.

Saeid Aramideh"There is a lot of excitement around technologies being developed for the data centre," says Saeid Aramideh, a Ranovus co-founder and chief marketing and sales officer. He highlights such technologies as switch ICs, software-defined networking (SDN), and components that deliver cost savings and power-consumption reductions. "Definitely, there is a lot of money available if you have the right team and value proposition," says Aramideh. "Not just in Silicon Valley is there interest, but in Canada and the EU."

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Ranovus developing DWDM links for the data centre

Ranovus has raised US $11 million in funding to develop Terabit capacity links for the data centre. The Ottawa-based start-up plans to use dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) technology to create huge data pipes that reduce significantly the power consumption, and cost, per bit.

Source: Gazettabyte

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