Ranovus shows 200 gigabit direct detection at ECOC

Ranovus has announced it first direct-detection optical products for applications including data centre interconnect.

Saeid AramidehThe start-up has announced two products to coincide with this week’s ECOC show being held in Dusseldorf, Germany.

One product is a 200 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) dense wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) CFP2 pluggable optical module that spans distances up to 130km. Ranovus will also sell the 200Gbps transmitter and receiver optical engines that can be integrated by vendors onto a host line card. 

The dense WDM direct-detection solution from Ranovus is being positioned as a cheaper, lower-power alternative to coherent optics used for high-capacity metro and long-haul optical transport. Using such technology, service providers can link their data centre buildings distributed across a metro area. 

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Former Compass Networks staff look to silicon photonics

The Compass Networks team that designed a novel chip with optical input-output is exploring new opportunities now that the IP core router venture has closed it doors. 

The team plans to develop chips using silicon photonics for input-output and is involved in a European Commission (EC) Horizon 2020 project dubbed L3Matrix that will make such a chip for the data centre. 

Kobi HasharoniCompass Network was the first company to sell a commercial product - an IP core router - that used an ASIC co-packaged with optics. The IP router was sold to several leading service providers including NTT Communications and Comcast but the venture ultimately failed.

Compass Networks has now become a software company, while its chip R&D team decided to spin off to keep the co-packaged IC and photonics technology alive. 

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Mobile backhaul chips rise to the LTE challenge

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular standard has a demanding set of mobile backhaul requirements. Gazettabyte looks at two different chip designs for LTE mobile backhaul, from PMC-Sierra and from Broadcom.

"Each [LTE Advanced cell] sector will be over 1 Gig and there will be a need to migrate the backhaul to 10 Gig"

Liviu Pinchas, PMC-Sierra

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Is Broadcom’s chip powering Juniper’s Stratus?

Briefing:  Data centre switching

Part 1: Single-layer switch architectures

Juniper Networks’ Stratus switch architecture, designed for next-generation data centres, is several months away from trials. First detailed in 2009, Stratus is being engineered as a single-layer switch with an architecture that will scale to support tens of thousands of 10 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) ports.

Stratus will be in customer trials in early 2011.

Andy Ingram, Juniper Networks

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