ST makes its first PSM4 optical engine deliveries

Flavio Benetti is upbeat about the prospects of silicon photonics. “Silicon photonics as a market is at a turning point this year,” he says.

What gives Benetti confidence is the demand he is seeing for 100-gigabit transceivers in the data centre. “From my visibility today, the tipping point is 2016,” says Benetti, group vice president and general manager, digital and mixed processes ASIC division at STMicroelectronics.

Flavio Benetti

Benetti and colleagues at ST have spent the last four years working to bring to market the silicon photonics technology that the chip company licensed from Luxtera.

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Verizon's move to become a digital service provider

Verizon’s next-generation network based on network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) is rapidly taking shape.

Working with Dell, Big Switch Networks and Red Hat, the US telco announced in April it had already brought online five data centres. Since then it has deployed more sites but is not saying how many.

Source: Verizon

“We are laying the foundation of the programmable infrastructure that will allow us to do all the automation, virtualisation and the software-defining we want to do on top of that,” says Chris Emmons, director, network infrastructure planning at Verizon.

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FPGAs with 56-gigabit transceivers set for 2017

Xilinx is expected to ship its first FPGAs featuring 56-gigabit transceivers next year. 

The company demonstrated a 56-gigabit transceiver using 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) at the recent OFC show. The 56-gigabit transceiver, also referred to as a serialiser-deserialiser (serdes), was shown successfully working over backplane specified for 25-gigabit signalling only.

Gilles GarciaXilinx's 56-gigabit serdes is implemented using a 16nm CMOS process node but the first FPGAs featuring the design will be made using a 7nm process. Gilles Garcia says the choice of 7nm CMOS is solely a business decision and not a technical one.

”Optical module [makers] will take another year to make something decent using PAM-4," says Garcia, Xilinx's director marketing and business development, wired communications. "Our 7nm FPGAs will follow very soon afterwards.”

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Enabling coherent optics down to 2km short-reach links

Silicon photonics luminaries series

Interview 5: Chris Doerr

Chris Doerr admits he was a relative latecomer to silicon photonics. But after making his first silicon photonics chip, he was hooked. Nearly a decade later and Doerr is associate vice president of integrated photonics at Acacia Communications. The company uses silicon photonics for its long-distance optical coherent transceivers.

Chris Doerr in the lab

Acacia Communications made headlines in May after completing an initial public offering (IPO), raising approximately $105 million for the company. Technology company IPOs have become a rarity and are not always successful. On its first day of trading, Acacia’s shares opened at $29 per share and closed just under $31.

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Richard Soref: The new frontiers of silicon photonics

Silicon photonics luminaries series

Interview 4: Professor Richard Soref

John Bowers acknowledges him with ‘kicking off’ silicon photonics some 30 years ago, while Andrew Rickman refers to him as the ‘founding father of silicon photonics’. An interview with Richard Soref. 

It was fibre-optic communications that started Professor Richard Soref on the path to silicon photonics.

“In 1985, the only photonic chip that could interface to fibre was the III-V semiconductor chip,” says Soref. He wondered if an elemental chip such as silicon could be used, and whether it might even do a better job. He had read in a textbook that silicon is relatively transparent at the 1.30-micron and 1.55-micron wavelengths used for telecom and it inspired him to look at silicon as a material for optical waveguides.

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Nokia’s PSE-2s delivers 400 gigabit on a wavelength

Nokia has unveiled what it claims is the first commercially announced coherent transport system to deliver 400 gigabits of data on a single wavelength. Using multiple 400-gigabit wavelengths across the C-band, 35 terabits of data can be transmitted.

Four hundred gigabit transmission over a single carrier is enabled using Nokia’s second-generation programmable Photonic Service Engine coherent processor, the PSE2, part of several upgrades to Nokia's flagship PSS 1830 family of packet-optical transport platforms.

Kyle Hollasch“One thing that is clear is that performance will have a key role to play in optics for a long time to come, including distance, capacity per fiber, and density,” says Sterling Perrin, senior analyst at Heavy Reading.

This limits the appeal of the so-called “white box” trend for many applications in optics, he says: “We will continue to see proprietary advances that boost performance in specific ways and which gain market traction with operators as a result”.

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Professor Graham Reed: The calm before the storm

Silicon photonics luminaries series

Interview 3: Professor Graham Reed

Despite a half-century track record driving technology, electronics is increasingly calling upon optics for help. “It seems to me that this is a marriage that is really going to define the future,” says Graham Reed, professor of silicon photonics at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre.

The optics alongside the electronics does not have to be silicon photonics, he says, but silicon as a photonics technology is attractive for several reasons. 

“What makes silicon photonics interesting is its promise to enable low-cost manufacturing, an important requirement for emerging consumer applications,” says Reed. And being silicon-based, it is much more compatible than other photonics technologies. “It probably means silicon photonics is going to win out,” he says. 

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