OFC 2023 show preview

• Sunday, March 5 marks the start of the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference in San Diego, California
• The three General Chairs - Ramon Casellas, Chris Cole, and Ming-Jun Li - discuss the upcoming conference

OFC 2023 will be a show of multiple themes. That, at least, is the view of the team overseeing and coordinating this year's conference and exhibition.

General Chair Ming-Jun Li of Corning who is also the recipient of the 2023 John Tyndall Award (see profiles, bottom), begins by highlighting the 1,000 paper submissions, suggesting that OFC has returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Ramon Casellas, another General Chair, highlights this year's emphasis on the social aspects of technology. "We are trying not to forget what we are doing and why we are doing it," he says.

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Nokia jumps a class with its PSE-6s coherent modem

• The 130 gigabaud (GBd) PSE-6s coherent modem is Nokia's first in-house design for high-end optical transport systems 
• The PSE-6s can send an 800 gigabit Ethernet (800GbE) payload over 2,000km and 1.2 terabits of data over 100km.
• Two PSE-6s DSPs can send three 800GbE signals over two 1.2-terabit wavelengths

Nokia has unveiled its latest coherent modem, the super coherent Photonic Service Engine 6s (PSE-6s) that will power its optical transport platforms in the coming years.

The PSE-6s comes three years after Nokia announced its current generation of coherent digital signal processors (DSPs): the PSE-Vs DSP for the long-haul and the compact PSE-Vc for the coherent pluggable market.

Nokia is only detailing the PSE-6s; its next-generation coherent modem for pluggables will be a future announcement.

Nokia will demonstrate the PSE-6s at the upcoming OFC show in March while field trials involving systems using the PSE-6s will start in the year's second half. 

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How to shepherd a company’s technologies for growth

CTO interviews part 3: Dr Julie Eng

• Eng is four months into her new role as CTO of Coherent.
• Previously, she headed Finisar’s transceiver business and then the 3D sensing business, first at Finisar and then at II-VI. II-VI changed its name to Coherent in September 2022
• “CTO is one of these roles that has no universal definition,” says Eng

Dr Julie Eng

Julie Eng loved her previous role.

She had been heading II-VI’s (now Coherent’s) 3D sensing unit after being VP of engineering at Finisar’s transceiver business. II-VI bought Finisar in 2019.

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Microchip expands the choice of 1.6-terabit Ethernet PHYs

Microchip Technology has enlarged its portfolio of 1.6-terabit physical layer (PHY) Ethernet chips targeting next-generation switch and router line cards.

Stephen Docking

In 2021, Microchip announced its PM6200 Meta-DX2L (‘L’ standing for light), its first 1.6-terabit Meta-DX2 PHY that uses 112-gigabit PAM-4 (4-level pulse-amplitude modulation) serialiser/ deserialisers (series).

Microchip has now added four more 1.6-terabit Ethernet PHYs dubbed Meta-DX2+.

Like the Meta-DX2L, the PHYs are implemented using a 6nm CMOS process while the ‘plus’ signifies added features.

The Meta-DX2L is used for such tasks as retiming, for a signal sent across the system’s backplane, for example, and has a ‘gearbox’ feature that translates between 28, 56 and 112-gigabit data rates.

With the Meta-DX2+ PHYs, Microchip has added port aggregation and security hardware.

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DustPhotonics readies its first optical engine

• DustPhotonics has a silicon photonics modulator capable of 200 gigabits per lane
• The start-up also has developed a precision laser-attach scheme

 DustPhotonics’s office view

Ronnen Lovinger waves as he approaches the local train station. DustPhotonics’ CEO is taking me to the company’s offices on the outskirts of Modi’in, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The site has a striking view of a landscape also halfway between Israel’s flat coastal plain and the steep hills of Jerusalem.

Lovinger has been CEO of DustPhotonics since 2021. Before that, he was chief operating officer (COO) at Innoviz Technologies, joining the lidar firm after 18 years at Mellanox, now part of Nvidia.

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Drut's agile optical fabric for the data centre

A US start-up has developed a photonic fabric for the data centre that pulls together the hardware needed for a computational task.

Drut Technologies offers management software and a custom line card, which, when coupled with the optical switch, grabs the hardware required for the workload.

Some of the Drut team (L to R): Sumit Jayaswal, member of technical staff; Bill Koss, CEO; and Jitender Miglani, founder and president.

“You can have a server with lots of resource machines: lots of graphic processing units (GPUs) and lots of memory,” says Bill Koss, CEO of Drut. “You create a machine, attach a workload to it and run it; forever, for a day, or 15 minutes.”

Drut first showcased its technology supporting the PCI Express (PCIe) bus over photonics at server specialist, SuperMicro’s exhibition stand, at the Supercomputing 22 show held last November in Dallas, Texas.

“This is a fully reconfigurable, direct-connect optical fabric for the data centre,” says Koss.

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Deutsche Telekom explains its IP-over-DWDM thinking

Telecom operators are always seeking better ways to run their networks. In particular, operators regularly scrutinise how best to couple the IP layer with their optical networking infrastructure.

The advent of 400-gigabit coherent modules that plug directly into an IP router is one development that has caught their eye.

Placing dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) interfaces directly onto an IP router allows the removal of a separate transponder box and its interfacing.

IP-over-DWDM is not a new concept. However, until now, operators have had to add a coherent line card, taking up valuable router chassis space.

Werner Weiershausen

Now, with the advent of compact 400-gigabit coherent pluggables developed for the hyperscalers to link their data centres, telecom operators have realised that such pluggables also serve their needs.

BT will start rolling out IP-over-DWDM in its network this year, while Deutsche Telekom has analysed the merits of IP-over-DWDM.

"The adoption of IP-over-DWDM is the subject of our techno-economical studies," says Werner Weiershausen, senior architect for the transport network at Deutsche Telekom.

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