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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60-second interview with .... Dell'Oro's Jimmy Yu

Market research firm Dell'Oro Group has reported that the global optical transport equipment market in the first half of 2012 shrank 5 percent, to US $6.1 billion. In the latest 60-second interview, Gazettabyte spoke with Jimmy Yu, vice president of optical transport research at Dell’Oro Group.

"For the year, it is going to be a fivefold growth rate [for 100 Gig transport]."

Jimmy Yu, Dell'Oro

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The uphill battle to keep pace with bandwidth demand

Relative traffic increase normalised to 2010 Source: IEEE

Optical component and system vendors will be increasingly challenged to meet the expected growth in bandwidth demand.

According to a recent comprehensive study by the IEEE (The IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment report), bandwidth requirements are set to grow 10x by 2015 compared to demand in 2010, and a further 10x between 2015 and 2020. Meanwhile, the technical challenges are growing for the vendors developing optical transmission equipment and short-reach high-speed optical interfaces. 

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The next high-speed Ethernet standard starts to take shape

Source: Gazettabyte

The IEEE has begun work to develop the next-speed Ethernet standard beyond 100 Gigabit to address significant predicted growth in bandwidth demand. 

The standards body has set up the IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Higher Speed Ethernet Consensus group, chaired by John D’Ambrosia, who previously chaired the 40 and 100 Gigabit IEEE P802.3ba Ethernet standards ratified in June 2010. "I guess I’m a glutton for punishment,” quips D'Ambrosia. 

The Higher Speed Ethernet standard could be completed by early 2017. 

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