Capella: Why the ROADM market is a good place to be

Gazettabyte spoke with Larry Schwerin, CEO of Capella Intelligent Subsystems, about the ROADM market, the company's plans following its latest funding round, and the idea of a WSS-on-a-chip.

The reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) market has been the best performing segment of the optical networking market over the last year. According to Infonetics Research, ROADM-based wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) equipment grew 20% from Q2, 2010 to Q1, 2011 whereas the overall optical networking market grew 7%.

“It’s the Moore’s Law: Every two years we are doubling the capacity in terms of channel count and port count”

Larry Schwerin, Capella

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Network processors to support multiple 100 Gigabit flows

EZchip Semiconductor has disclosed the first 200 Gigabit-per-second network processor chip. The NP-5 will double the packet processing performance of the company’s existing NP-4 network processor and will sample at the end of 2012.  

“We don’t know of any device, announced at least, that comes close to this”

Amir Eyal, EZchip

The NP-5 is noteworthy in integrating within a single chip a full-duplex 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) packet processor and traffic manager. Such integration is important as line cards move from 100Gbps to 400Gbps densities, says Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group.

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Boosting high-performance computing with optics

Briefing: Optical Interconnect

Part 2: High-performance computing

IBM has adopted optical interfaces for its latest POWER7-based high-end computer system. Gazettabyte spoke to IBM Fellow, Ed Seminaro, about high-performance computing and the need for optics to address bandwidth and latency requirements.

“At some point when you go a certain distance you have to go to an optical link” 

Ed Seminaro, IBM Fellow 

IBM has used parallel optics for its latest POWER7 computing systems, the Power 775. The optical interfaces are used to connect computing node drawers that make up the high-end computer. Each node comprises 32 POWER7 chips, with each chip hosting eight processor cores, each capable of running up to four separate programming tasks or threads.  

Using optical engines, each node – a specialised computing card - has a total bandwidth of 224, 120 Gigabit-per-second (12x10Gbps) VCSEL-based transmitters and 224, 120Gbps receivers. The interfaces can interconnect up to 2,048 nodes, over half a million POWER7 cores, with a maximum network diameter of only three link hops.

IBM claims that with the development of the Power 775, it has demonstrated the superiority of optics over copper for high-end computing designs.

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Optical networking market in rude health

Quarterly market revenues, global optical networking (1Q 2011). Source: Ovum

Despite recent falls in optical equipment makers’ stock, the optical networking market remains in good health with analysts predicting 6-7% growth in 2011.

For Andrew Schmitt, directing analyst for optical at Infonetics Research, unfulfilled expectations are nothing new. Optical networking is a market of single-digit yearly growth yet in the last year certain market segments have grown above average: spending on ROADM-based wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical network equipment, for example, has grown 20% since the first quarter of 2010.

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LTE-Advanced - a mind map

 A mind map of the emerging 3GPP LTE Release 10 standard, also known as LTE-Advanced. For a pdf, click here 

R&D: At home or abroad?

ECI Telecom chose to set up its latest R&D site in Israel. Gazettabyte met with Chaim Urbach, ECI’s head of global R&D operations, to discuss why it decided to locate its latest site in Israel, and how the company can compete with the leading telecom players that have considerably larger R&D teams and budgets.

Omer Industrial Park in the Negev, Israel; the location of ECI Telecom's latest R&D centre.

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Fibre-to-the-FPGA

Briefing: Optical Interconnect

Part 1: FPGAs

Programmable logic chip vendor Altera is developing FPGAs with optical interfaces. But is there a need for such technology and how difficult will it be to develop? 

FPGAs with optical interfaces promise to simplify high-speed interfacing between and within telecom and datacom systems. Such fibre-based FPGAs, once available, could also trigger novel system architectures. But not all FPGA vendors believe optical-enabled FPGAs’ time has come, arguing that cost and reliability hurdles must be overcome for system vendors to embrace the technology 

“One of the advantages of using optics is that you haven’t got to throw your backplanes away as [interface] speeds increase.”

Craig Davis, Altera

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