Nokia shares its vision for cost-reduced coherent optics

Nokia explains why coherent optics will be key for high-speed short-reach links and shares some of its R&D activities. The latest in a series of articles addressing what next for coherent.

Part 3: Reducing cost, size and power 

Coherent optics will play a key role in the network evolution of the telecom and webscale players.

The modules will be used for ever-shorter links to enable future cloud services delivered over 5G and fixed-access networks.

Tod Sizer

The first uses will be to link data centres and support traffic growth at the network edge.

This will be followed with coherent optics being used within the data centre, once traffic growth requires solutions that 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) direct-detect optics can no longer address.

“If you look at PAM4 up to 100 gigabit for long reach and extended reach optics - distances below 80km - it does not scale to higher data rates,” says Marc Bohn, part of product management for Nokia’s optical subsystem group. ”It only scales if you use 100-gigabit in parallel.”

However, to enable short-reach coherent optics, its cost, size and power consumption will need to be reduced significantly. Semiconductor packaging techniques will need to be embraced as will a new generation of coherent digital signal processors (DSPs).

Capacity growth

The adoption of network-edge and on-premise cloud technologies are fueling capacity growth, says Tod Sizer, smart optical fabric & devices research lab leader at Nokia Bell Labs.

Nokia says capacity growth is at 50 per cent per annum and is even faster within the data centre; for every gigabyte entering a data centre, ten gigabytes are transported within the data centre.

“All of this is driving huge amounts of growth in optical capacity at shorter distances,” says Sizer. “To meet that [demand], we need to have coherent solutions to take over where PAM-4 stops.”

Sizer oversees 130 engineers whose research interests include silicon photonics, coherent components and coherent algorithms. 

Applications

As well as data centre interconnect, coherent optics will be used for 5G, access and cable networks; markets also highlighted by Infinera and Acacia Communications.

Marc Bohn

Nokia says the first driver is data centre interconnect.

The large-scale data centre operators triggered the market for 80-120km coherent pluggables with the 400ZR specification for data centre interconnect.

“Right now, with the different architectures in data centres, these guys are saying 80-120km may be an overshoot, maybe we need something for shorter distances to be more efficient,” says Bohn. “Certainly, coherent can tackle that and that is what we are preparing for because there is no alternative, only coherent can cover that space.”

5G is also driving the need for greater bandwidth.

“Traditionally a whole load of processing has been done at the remote ratio head but increasingly, for cost and performance reasons, people are looking at pulling the processing back into the data centre,” says Sizer.

Another traffic driver is how each cellular antenna has three sectors and can use multiple frequency bands.

“Some research we are looking at requires 400 gigabits and above,” says Sizer. “If you want to do a full [mobile] front haul for a massive MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) array, for example.”

Challenges

Several challenges need to be overcome before coherent modules are used widely for shorter-reach links.

To reduce coherent module cost, the optics and DSP need to be co-packaged, borrowing techniques developed by the chip industry.

“Optical and electrical should be brought close together,” says Bohn. "[They should be] co-designed and co-packaged, and the ideal candidate for that is to combine silicon photonics and the DSP.”

The aim is to turn complex designs into a system-on-chip. “Both [the DSP and silicon photonics] are CMOS and you can apply 2D and 3D [die] stacking multi-chip module techniques,” says Bohn, who contrasts it with the custom and manual manufacturing techniques used today.

The coherent DSP also needs to be much simpler than the high-end DSPs used for long-distance optical transport.

For example, the dispersion compensation, which accounts for a significant portion of the chip’s circuitry, is less demanding for shorter links. The forward-error-correction scheme used can also be relaxed as can the bit precision of the analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue converters.

Nokia can co-design the silicon photonics and the DSP following its acquisition of Elenion. Nokia is also exploiting Elenion’s packaging know-how and the partnerships it has developed.

Inside the data centre

Nokia highlights two reasons why coherent will eventually be used within the data centre.

The first is the growth in capacity needed inside the data centre. “For the same reason we believe coherent will be the right solution for data centre interconnect and access, the same argument can be made within the data centre,” says Sizer.

A campus data centre is distributed across several buildings and linking them is driving a need for 400-gigabit lanes or more.

This requires a ZR-like solution but for 2km or so rather than 80km.

“It is one of the solutions certainly but that will be driven an awful lot by whether we can make cost-effective solutions to meet the cost targets of the data centre,” says Sizer. That said, there are other ways this can be addressed such as adding fibre.

“Having parallel systems is another area of ongoing research,” says Sizer. “We may need to have unique solutions if traffic grows faster inside the data centre than outside such as spatial-division multiplexing as well as coherent.”

The use of coherent interfaces for networking inside the data centre will take longer.

Bohn points out that 51.2-terabit and 102.4-terabit switches will continue to be served using direct-detect optics but after that, it is unclear because direct-detect optics tops out at 100-gigabits or perhaps 200-gigabits per lane.

“With coherent, it is much easier to get to higher data rates especially over shorter distances,” says Bohn.

Another development benefitting the use of coherent is the next Ethernet standard after 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE).

“My research team is looking at that and, in particular, 1.6 Terabit Ethernet (TbE) which is fairly out in the future,” says Sizer. “It will demand a coherent solution, as I expect 800GbE will as well.”

Work to define the next Ethernet standard is starting now and will only be completed in 2025 at the earliest.