Industry in a flurry of mid-reach MSA announcements

Another day, another multi-source agreement.

The CLR4 Alliance is the latest 100 Gig multi-source agreement (MSA) to address up-to-2km links in the data centre. The 100 Gig CLR4 Alliance is backed by around 20 companies including data centre operators, equipment vendors, optical module and component players and chip makers.

The table provides a summary of the latest MSAs and how they relate to the IEEE 100 Gigabit client interface standards. Source: Gazettabyte.

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OFC/NFOEC 2013 product round-up - Part 1

Part 1: Client-side transceivers 

• First CFP2 single-mode and multi-mode transceiver announcements
• Cisco Systems unveils its CPAK module
• 100 Gigabit QSFPs from Kotura and Luxtera
• CFP2 and 40km CFP 10x10 MSA modules
• Infiniband FDR and 'LR4 superset' QSFPs

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Aurrion mixes datacom and telecom lasers on a wafer

Silicon photonics player, Aurrion, has detailed the making of multiple laser designs for datacom and telecom on a single wafer. The multiple designs on one wafer benefit the economics of telecom lasers by manufacturing them alongside higher-volume datacom sources.

"There is an inevitability of the co-mingling of electronics and optics and we are just at the beginning"

Eric Hall, Aurrion

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OFC/NFOEC 2013 to highlight a period of change

Next week's OFC/NFOEC conference and exhibition, to be held in Anaheim, California, provides an opportunity to assess developments in the network and the data centre and get an update on emerging, potentially disruptive technologies.

Source: Gazettabyte

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OneChip Photonics targets the data centre with its PICs

OneChip Photonics is developing integrated optical components for the IEEE 40GBASE-LR4 and 100GBASE-LR4 interface standards.

The company believes its photonic integrated circuits (PICs) will more than halve the cost of the 40 and 100 Gigabit 10km-reach interfaces, enough for LR4 to cost-competitively address shorter reach applications in the data centre.

"I think we can cut the price [of LR4 modules] by half or better”

Andy Weirich, OneChip Photonics

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The CFP4 optical module to enable Terabit blades

The next-generation CFP modules - the CFP2 and CFP4 - promise to double and double again the number of 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) optical module interfaces on a blade.

Using the CFP4, up to 16, 100Gbps modules will fit on a blade, a total line rate of 1.6 Terabits-per-second (Tbps). With a goal of a 60W total module power budget per blade, that equates to 27Gbps/W. In comparison, the power-efficient SFP+ achieves 10Gbps/W.

 

Source: Gazettabyte, Xilinx

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Next-gen 100 Gigabit short reach optics starts to take shape

The latest options for 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) interfaces are beginning to take shape following a meeting of the IEEE 802.3 Next Generation 100Gb/s Optical Ethernet Study Group.  

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