Silicon photonics: Q&A with Kotura's CTO

A Q&A with Mehdi Asghari, CTO of silicon photonics start-up, Kotura.  In part one, Asghari talks about a recent IEEE conference that included silicon photonics, the next Ethernet standard, and the merits of silicon photonics for system design.

Part 1

 

"Photons and electrons are like cats and dogs. Electrons are dogs: they behave, they stick by you, they are loyal, they do exactly as you tell them, whereas cats are their own animals and they do what they like. And that is what photons are like."

Mehdi Asghari, CTO of Kotura

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Does Cisco Systems' CPAK module threaten the CFP2?

Cisco Systems has been detailing over recent months its upcoming proprietary optical module dubbed CPAK. The development promises to reduce the market opportunity for the CFP2 multi-source agreement (MSA) and has caused some disquiet in the industry.

Source: Cisco Systems, Gazettabyte, see comments

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The CFP2 pluggable module gains industry momentum

Finisar and Oclaro unveiled their first CFP2 optical transceiver products at the recent ECOC exhibition in Amsterdam. JDSU also announced that its ONT-100G test equipment now supports the latest 100Gbps module form factor.

Source: Oclaro

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JDSU's Brandon Collings on silicon photonics, optical transport & the tunable SFP+

JDSU's CTO for communications and commercial optical products, Brandon Collings, discusses reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), 100 Gigabit, silicon photonics, and the status of JDSU's tunable SFP+.

"We have been continually monitoring to find ways to use the technology [silicon photonics] for telecom but we are not really seeing that happen”

Brandon Collings, JDSU

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Teraxion embraces silicon photonics for its products

Teraxion has become a silicon photonics player with the launch of its compact 40 and 100 Gigabit coherent receivers.

The Canadian optical component company has long been known for its fibre Bragg gratings and tunable dispersion compensation products. But for the last three years it has been developing expertise in silicon photonics and at the recent European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) exhibition it announced its first products based on the technology.

"You don't have this [fabless] model for indium phosphide or silica, while an ecosystem is developing around silicon photonics"

Martin Guy, Teraxion

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MultiPhy targets low-power coherent metro chip for 2013

MultiPhy has given first details of its planned 100 Gigabit coherent chip for metro networks. The Israeli fabless start-up expects to have samples of the device in 2013. 

"We can tolerate greater [signal] impairments which means the requirements on the components we can use are more relaxed"

Avi Shabtai, CEO of MultiPhy

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Optical industry restructuring: The analysts' view

The view that the optical industry is due a shake-up has been aired periodically over the last decade. Yet the industry's structure has remained intact. Now, with the depressed state of the telecom industry, the spectre of impending restructuring is again being raised.

In Part 2, Gazettabyte asked several market research analysts - Heavy Reading's Sterling Perrin, Ovum's Daryl Inniss and Dell'Oro's Jimmy Yu - for their views.

Part II: The analysts' view

"It is just a very slow, grinding process of adjustment; I am not sure that the next five years will be any different to what we've seen"

Sterling Perrin, Heavy Reading

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