ECOC 2012 summary - Part 2: Finisar

Gazettabyte completes its summary of key optical announcements at the recent ECOC show held in Amsterdam. In Part 2, Finisar's announcements are detailed.

Part 2

"The general thought with system vendors is that the more they can shrink the in-line equipment into a fewer number of slots, the more slots they have open and available for revenue-generating transceiver and transponder cards"

Rafik Ward, Finisar

Finisar showed its board-mounted parallel optics module in use within a technology demonstrator from data storage firm Xyratex, showcased what it claims is the industry's first two-slot reconfigurable optical add/ drop multiplexer (ROADM) design, unveiled its first CFP2 pluggable transceiver and announced its latest WaveShaper products.

The data storage application uses Finisar's vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL)-based board mounted optical assembly. The optical assembly - or optical engine -  comprises 24-channels, 12 transmitters and 12 receivers.

The optical engine sits on the board and is used for such applications as chip-to-chip interconnect, optical backplanes, and dense front panels, and supports a variety of protocols. These include PCI Express, Ethernet and Infiniband as well as proprietary schemes. Indeed the only limit is the VCSEL speed. The optical engine is designed to support traffic up to 28 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) per channel, once 28 Gigabit VCSELs become available. Finisar have already demonstrated working 28Gbps VCSELs.

The ECOC demonstration showed the optical engine in use within Xyratex's demonstrator storage system. "They are carrying traffic between internal controller cards and the traffic being carried is 12-Gig SAS [serial attached SCSI]," says Rafik Ward, vice president of marketing at Finisar.

As well as the optical engine, the demonstration included polymer waveguides from Vario-optics which connect the optical engine to a backplane connector, built by Huber + Suhner, as well as SAS silicon from LSI.

Finisar first showed the waveguide and connector technologies in a demonstration at OFC 2012.  "This is an early prototype but it's a very exciting one," says Ward. "It shows all elements of the ecosystem coming together and running in a live system."  

Finisar also showcased what it claims is the industry's first two-slot ROADM line card. The line card was part of a Cisco Systems' platform, according to one analyst shown the demonstration.

The company-designed card uses a high port-count wavelength-selective switch (WSS) that enables both add and drop traffic. "We have built transmit and receive into the same line card using a high port-count device," says Ward. Finisar is not detailing the exact WSS used or how the system is implemented but describes it as a flexible spectrum, 2x1x17 port line card.

The advantage of a denser ROADM line card is that it frees up slots in a system vendor's chassis. A slot can be used for either in-line equipment - WSSes and amplifiers - or terminal equipment that host the transceivers and transponders.

"It is like valuable real-estate," says Ward. "The general thought with system vendors is that the more they can shrink the in-line equipment into a fewer number of slots, the more slots they have open and available for revenue-generating transceiver and transponder cards."

The company also detailed its first CFP2 100 Gigabit optical transceiver. The CFP2 uses a single TOSA comprising four distributed feedback (DFB) lasers, a shared thermo-electric cooler and the multiplexer. The CFP2 consumes under 8W by using the DFBs and an integrated transceiver optical sub-assembly (TOSA).