Ciena enhances its 6500 packet-optical transport family

Ciena has upgraded its 6500 family of packet-optical transport platforms with the T-series that supports higher-capacity electrical and optical switching and higher-speed line cards.

"The 6500 T-Series is a big deal as Ciena can offer two different systems depending on what the customer is looking for," says Andrew Schmitt, founder and principal analyst of market research firm, Cignal AI.

Helen XenosIf customers want straightforward transport and the ability to reach a number of different distances, there is the existing 6500 S-series, says Schmitt. The T-series is a system specifically for metro-regional networks that can accommodate multiple traffic types – OTN or packet.

"It has very high density for a packet-optical system and offers pay-as-you-grow with CFP2-ACO [coherent pluggable] modules," says Schmitt.

Ciena says the T-series has been developed to address new connectivity requirements service providers face. Content is being shifted to the metro to improve the quality of experience for end users and reduce capacity on backbone networks. Such user consumption of content is one factor accounting for the strong annual 40 percent growth in metro traffic.

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OFC 2016: 20-plus technical paper highlights

Silicon photonics, microservers, 100 gigabit PON, advanced modulation techniques, sliceable transponders, the Nonlinear Shannon Limit, space division multiplexing and 3D packaging. Just some of the topics in a wider collection of technical paper highlights at OFC 2016. 

To download a copy of the complete mind map, click here. 

Daryl Inniss reflects on a career in market research

Daryl Inniss was until recently an analyst covering optical components. In an invited piece, he reflects on the role of a market researcher and what he has learnt in his 15-year career.

Daryl Inniss 

Rocky beginnings

I jumped ship in 2001 joining RHK, a market research firm, knowing nothing about the craft. I had been a technical manager and loved research and development, but work was 500 miles from my family and the weekly commute was gruelling.

Back then, the telecom market was crashing and I believed my job was at risk. Moving to a small market research firm could hardly be described as good planning, but it turned out to be a godsend.

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OFC 2016: a sample of the technical paper highlights

Optical transmission technologies, Flexible Ethernet, software-defined networking, CFP2-ACOs and silicon photonics are just some of the topics at this year's OFC 2016 conference to be held in Anaheim, California between March 20th and 24th. 

Here is a small sample of the technical paper highlights being presented at the conference.

Doubling core network capacity 

Microsoft has conducted a study measuring the performance of its North American core backbone network to determine how the use of bandwidth-variable transceivers (BVTs) could boost capacity.

The highest capacity modulation scheme suited for each link from the choice of polarisation-multiplexed, quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK), polarisation-multiplexed, 8 quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-8QAM) and PM-16QAM can then be used.

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100 gigabit the next stop on PON's roadmap

A Q&A with Frank Effenberger, vice president of the Fixed Access Network Laboratory at Futurewei Technologies, the US subsidiary of Huawei. Effenberger is also rapporteur of the ITU-T Q2/15 group that standardises optical access. 

 Source: Huawei

Q. What are the various ways the industry is considering implementing 100 Gigabit? 

FE: The work happening now is to do a 25 gigabit-per-second wavelength, and then multiple wavelengths will be combined in some way to create 50-gigabit or 100-gigabit speed offerings.

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Silicon photonics adds off-chip comms to a RISC-V processor

A group of researchers have developed a microprocessor that uses silicon photonics-based optics to send and receive data.

"For the first time a system - a microprocessor - has been able to communicate with the external world using something other than electronics," says Vladimir Stojanovic, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Vladimir Stojanovic

The microprocessor is the result of work that started at MIT nearly a decade ago as part of a project sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate the integration of photonics and electronics for off-chip and even intra-chip communications.  

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Imec gears up for the Internet of Things economy

Luc Van den hove is talking in the darkened ballroom in a hotel next to the brilliantly sunlit marina in Herzliya.

It is the imec's CEO's first trip to Israel and around us the room is being prepared for an afternoon of presentations the Belgium nanoelectronics research centre will give on its work in such areas as the Internet of Things and 5G wireless to an audience of Israeli start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Luc Van den hoveImec announced in February its plan to merge with iMinds, a Belgium research centre specialising in systems software and security, a move that will add 1,000 staff to imec's 2,500 researchers.

At first glance, the world-renown semiconductor process technology R&D centre joining forces with a systems house is a surprising move. But for Van den hove, it is a natural development as the company continues to grow from its technology origins to include systems-based research.

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