Jagdeep Singh's Infinera effect
Talking to gazettabyte, he reflects on the ups and downs of being a CEO, his love of running, 40 Gigabit transmission and why he is looking forward to his next role at Infinera.
"We are looking to lead the 40 Gig market, not be first to market.”
Jagdeep Singh, Infinera CEO
Ask Jagdeep Singh about how Infinera came about and there is no mistaking the enthusiasm and excitement in his voice.
During the bubble era of 2000 he started to question whether the push to all-optical networking pursued by numerous start-ups made sense. “The reason for these all-optical device companies was that they were developing the analogue functions needed,” says Singh. “Yet what operators really wanted was access to the [digital] bits.”
This led him to think about optical-to-electrical (O-E) conversion and the digital processing of signals to correct for transmission impairments. “The question then was: could this be done in a low-cost way?” says Singh. Achieving O-E conversion would also allow access to the bits for add/ drop, switching and grooming functions at the sub-wavelength level before using inverse electrical-to-optical (E-O) conversion to continue the optical transmission.
“We came at this from an orthogonal direction: building lower-cost O-E-O. Was it possible?” says Singh. “The answer was that most of the cost was in the packaging and that led us to think about photonic integration.”
Singh started out with his colleague Drew Perkins (now Infinera’s CTO) with whom he co-founded Lightera, a company acquired by Ciena in 1999. Then the two met with Dave Welch at a Christmas party in 2000. Welch had been CTO of SDL, a company just acquired by JDS Uniphase. “It was clear that he was not that happy and there were a lot of VCs (venture capitalists) chasing him,” says Singh. “He (Welch) recognised the power of what we were planning.” In January 2001 the three founded Infinera.
So why is he stepping down as CEO? The answer is to focus on long-term strategy. And perhaps to reclaim time outside work, given he has a young family.
He may even have more time for running.
Singh typically runs at least two marathons a year. “As a CEO your schedule is fully booked. There is so much stuff there is no time to think.” Running for him is quiet time. “I can get out and recharge the batteries. I find it invaluable. I can process things and it keeps the stress levels down.”
Being CEO
“There are two roles to being a CEO: running the business – the P&Ls (profit and loss statements), financials, sales – all real-time and urgent; and then there is the second part – setting the product vision: what products will be needed in two, three, four years’ time?” he says.
This second part is particularly important for Infinera given it develops products around its photonic integrated circuit (PIC) designs, requiring a longer development cycle than other optical equipment makers. “We have to get the requirements right up front,” says Singh.
And it is this part of the CEO’s role, he says, that gets trumped due to real-time tasks that must be addressed. Thus, from January, Singh will become Infinera’s executive chairman focussing exclusively on product planning. “If I had to choose [between the two roles], the longer term stuff is more appealing,” he says.
Looking back over his period as CEO, he believes his biggest achievement has been the team assembled at Infinera. “What I’ve learnt over the years is that the quality of success depends on the quality of the team.
“We started after the telecom bust,” says Singh. “There were world-class people that were never that locked in and [once on board] they knew people that they respected.” Now Infinera has a staff of 1,000, and had gone from a start-up to a publicly-listed company.
One downside of becoming a large company is that Singh regrets no longer personally knowing all his staff. “What I miss is that I knew everyone, I was part of a small team with a lot of energy,” he says. Another change is all the regulatory, legal and accounting that a public company must do. “I was also free to do and say what I wanted. Now I have to be a lot more careful.”
The Infinera effect
Asked about why Infinera is still not shipping a PIC with 40Gbps line rate channels, it is Singh-as-scrutinised-CEO that kicks in. “If we built 40 Gig purely using off-the-shelf components we’d have a product.” But he argues that the economics of 40 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) are still not compelling. According to market research firm Ovum, he says, it will only be 2012 when 40Gbps dips below four times the cost of 10Gbps.
Indeed in Q3 2009 shipments of 40Gbps slipped. According to Ovum, this was in part due to what it calls the “Infinera effect” that is lowering the cost of existing 10Gbps technology. Only when 40Gbps is around 2.5x the cost of 10Gbps that it is likely to take off; the economic rule-of-thumb with all previous optical speed hikes.
“Our goal is to come in with a 40 Gig solution that is economically viable,” says Singh. This is what Infinera is working on with its 10x40Gbps PIC pair of chips that integrate hundreds of optical functions. “With the PIC we are looking to lead the 40 Gig market, not be first to market.”
This year also saw Infinera introduce its second class of platform, the ATN, aimed at metro networks. The platform was developed across three Infinera sites: in Silicon Valley, India and China.
Coupled with Infinera’s DTN, the ATN allows end-to-end bandwidth management of its systems. “Until now we have only played in long-haul; this now doubles the market we play in,” says Infinera's CEO. Italian operator Tiscali announced in December 2009 its plan to deploy Infinera’s systems with the ATN being deployed in 80 metro locations.
How are cheap wavelength-selective switches and tunability impacting Infinera’s business? Singh bats away the question: “We just don’t see it in our space.”
Singh agrees with Infinera’s Dave Welch’s thesis that PICs are optics’ current disruption. What developments can he cite that will indicate this is indeed happening?
There are several examples that would confirm this, he says: “PICs in adjacent devices such as routers or switches; you would need something like a PIC to reduce the power and space of such platforms.” Other areas of adoption include connecting multiple bays such as required for the largest IP core routers, and even chip-to-chip interconnect.
Surely chip-to-chip is silicon photonics not Infinera’s PICs’ based on indium phosphide technology? Is silicon photonics of interest to Infinera?
"We are an optical transport company. To generate light over vast distances requires indium phosphide,” says Singh. “But if and when there is a breakthrough in silicon to generate light efficiently, we’d want to take advantage of that.”
One wonders what ideas Singh will come up with on his two-hour runs once he can think beyond the next financial quarter.
OneChip solution for Fibre-To-The-Home
Jim Hjartarson, CEO of OneChip PhotonicsAn interview with Jim Hjartarson, CEO of OneChip Photonics
Q. In March 2009, OneChip raised $19.5m. How difficult is it nowadays for an optical component firm to receive venture capital funding?
A. Clearly, the venture capital community, given the current macroeconomic environment, is being selective about the new investments it makes in the technology market in general, and photonics in particular. However, if you can demonstrate that you have a unique approach to a problem that has not yet been solved, and that there is a large, untapped market opportunity, VCs will be interested in your value proposition.
Q. What is it about your company's business plan that secured the investment?
A. We believe OneChip Photonics has three fundamental advantages that resulted in our securing our initial two rounds of funding, which totaled $19.5 million:
- A truly breakthrough approach and technology that will remove the cost and performance barriers that have been impeding the ubiquitous deployment of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) and enable new business and consumer broadband applications.
- A large, untapped market opportunity. Ovum estimates that the FTTx optical transceiver market will grow from $387 million by the end of 2009 to $594 million by the end of 2013. OneChip also is poised to introduce photonics integration into other high-volume business and consumer markets, where our breakthrough photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology can reduce costs and improve performance. These markets could be orders of magnitude larger than the FTTx optical transceiver market.
- A seasoned and successful management team. OneChip has attracted top talent – from industry leading companies such as MetroPhotonics, Bookham, Catena Networks, Fiberxon, Nortel and Teknovus – who have successful track records of designing, manufacturing, marketing and selling transceivers, PICs and mass-market broadband access solutions.
Q. The passive optical networking (PON) transceiver market faces considerable pricing pressures. Companies use TO cans and manual labour or more sophisticated hybrid integration where the laser and photodetectors are dropped onto a common platform to meet various PON transceiver specifications. Why is OneChip pursuing indium phosphide-based monolithic integration and why will such an approach be cheaper than a hybrid platform that can address several PON standards?
A. Most current FTTH transceiver providers base their transceivers on either discrete optics or planar lightwave circuit (PLC) designs. These designs offer low levels of integration and require assembly from multiple parts. There is little technical differentiation among them. Rather, vendors must compete on the basis of who can assemble the parts in a slightly cheaper fashion. And there is little opportunity to further reduce such costs.
While more integrated than fully discrete optics-based designs, PLC designs still require discrete active components and the assembly of as many as 10 parts. Great care must be taken, during the manufacturing process, to align all parts of the transceiver correctly. And while packaging can be non-hermetic, these parts can fall out of alignment through thermal or mechanical stress. PLC designs also have proven to be an expensive alternative. For all of these reasons, the PON system vendors with which OneChip has engaged have indicated that they are not interested in deploying PLC-based designs.
OneChip Photonics is taking a new approach with its breakthrough PIC technology. OneChip is monolithically integrating all the functions required for an optical transceiver onto a single, indium phosphide (InP)-based chip. All active AND passive components of the chip – including the distributed-feedback (DFB) laser, optically pre-amplified detector (OPAD), wavelength splitter (WS), spot-size converter (SSC), and various elements of passive waveguide circuitry – are, uniquely, integrated in one epitaxial growth step, without re-growth or post-growth modification of the epitaxial material.
With respect to transmit performance, OneChip’s single-frequency DFB lasers will offer a superior performance – much more suitable for longer-reach and higher bit-rate applications – than competing Fabry-Perot (FP) lasers. With respect to receive performance, OneChip’s optically pre-amplified detectordesign is a higher gain-bandwidth solution than competing avalanche photodiode (APD) solutions. It also is a lower-cost solution, as it does not require a high-voltage power source.
OneChip’smonolithic photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have the smallest footprint on the market, the optical parts are aligned for life, and the parts are highly robust (resistant to vibration and other outside elements). Further, OneChip’s PICs are designed for automated mounting on a silicon optical bench, without requiring active alignment, using industry-standard, automated assembly processes – resulting in high yields of good devices.
Utilizing automated production processes, OneChip can maintain the highest production scalability (easily ramping up and down) in the industry and respond rapidly to customer needs. Standard production processes also mean reliable supplies to customers, at the lowest prices on the market.
Q. Several companies have explored integrated PON solutions and have either dismissed the idea or have come to market with impressive integrated designs only to ultimately fail (e.g. Xponent Photonics).Why are you confident OneChip will fare better?
As noted earlier, PLC designs developed by vendors such as Xponent are not fully integrated. PLC designs still require discrete active components and the assembly of as many as 10 parts, using a glass substrate. This results in poor yields and high costs.
OneChip is taking a fundamentally different approach. We are the only company in the optical access market that is monolithically integrating all the active and passive functions required for an optical transceiver onto a single, indium phosphide (InP)-based chip. This enables us to achieve low cost, high performance, high yields and high quality.
OneChip is one of only a few companies with new core intellectual property and advanced technology in the optical transceiver business that can sustain a competitive advantage over other optical component providers, which rely on conventional technology and assembly processes. Carriers and system providers recognize that an approach, which would eliminate assembly from multiple parts, is needed to lower the cost and improve the performance of transceivers, Optical Network Terminals (ONTs) and Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) in optical access networks. We believe OneChip’s fully integrated technology can help unleash the potential of FTTH and other mass-market optical communications applications.
Q. If integrated PON is a good idea why, in OneChip’s opinion, have silicon photonics startups so far ignored this market?
A. “Silicon photonics” designs face the inherent limitation that a laser cannot be implemented in silicon. Therefore, separate optical and electrical devices must be grown with different processes and then assembled together. With as many as 10 parts having to be interconnected on a ceramic substrate, the alignment, tuning and reliability issues can significantly add costs and reduce yields.
In addition, system providers and service providers need to be cognizant of the inherent performance limitations with transceivers built from discrete parts. While short-reach EPON transceivers already have been optimized down to below a U.S. $15 price, these implementations can only meet low-end performance requirements. Networks would require a switch to more costly transceivers to support longer-range EPON, 2.5G EPON, GPON or 10G PON. Because most service providers are looking to reap the payback benefits of their investments in fiber installations/retrofits over the shortest possible timeframes, it doesn’t make sense to risk adding the high cost of a forklift changeover of transceiver technology at some point during the payback period.
Q. PON with its high volumes has always been viewed as the first likely market for photonic integrated circuits (PICs). What will be the second?
A. OneChip recognizes that optical communications is becoming economically and technologically mandatory in areas outside of traditional telecommunications, such as optical interconnections in data centers and other short to ultra-short reach broadband optical networks. OneChip is poised to introduce photonics integration into these and other high-volume business and consumer markets, where our PIC technology can reduce costs and improve performance.
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