How to shepherd a company’s technologies for growth

CTO interviews part 3: Dr Julie Eng

• Eng is four months into her new role as CTO of Coherent.
• Previously, she headed Finisar’s transceiver business and then the 3D sensing business, first at Finisar and then at II-VI. II-VI changed its name to Coherent in September 2022
• “CTO is one of these roles that has no universal definition,” says Eng

Dr Julie Eng

Julie Eng loved her previous role.

She had been heading II-VI’s (now Coherent’s) 3D sensing unit after being VP of engineering at Finisar’s transceiver business. II-VI bought Finisar in 2019.

Click to read more ...

Lumentum’s CTO discusses photonic trends

CTO interviews part 2: Brandon Collings

• The importance of moving to parallel channels will only increase given the continual growth in bandwidth.
• Lumentum's integration of NeoPhotonics’ engineers and products has been completed.
• The use of coherent techniques continues to grow, which is why Lumentum acquired the telecom transmission product lines and staff of IPG Photonics.

Brandon Collings has been a CTO for over 13 years; first as CTO of the commercial optical products (CCOP) business within JDSU and then CTO of Lumentum when it spun out in 2015. In that time, the scope of his work has continued to grow.

Brandon Collings

"It has changed quite significantly given what Lumentum is engaging in," he says. "My role spans the entire company; I'm engaged in a lot of areas well beyond communications."

A decade ago, the main focus was telecom and datacom. Now Lumentum also addresses commercial lasers, 3D sensing, and, increasingly, automotive lidar.

Click to read more ...

ECOC '22 Reflections - Final Part

Gazettabyte has asked industry and academic figures for their thoughts after attending ECOC 2022, held last month in Basel, Switzerland. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned, and what, if anything, surprised them.

In the final part, Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi of Coherent, Acacia’s Tom Williams, ADVA’s Jörg-Peter Elbers and Fabio Pittalà of Keysight Technologies share their thoughts.

Click to read more ...

Ciena's multi-format 400G coherent QSFP-DD pluggable

Ciena showcased a working 400-gigabit Universal coherent pluggable module at the ECOC 2022 conference and exhibition in Basel, Switzerland.

Ciena is using its WaveLogic 5 Nano coherent digital signal processor (DSP) for the Universal QSFP-DD coherent pluggable module.

"We call it universal because it supports many transmission modes - interoperable and high performance; the most in the industry," says Helen Xenos, senior director of portfolio marketing at Ciena. 

A look inside Ciena's 400-gigabit Universal coherent pluggable module. TOF is the tunable optical filter. Source: Ciena

The pluggable has custom extended-performance modes and supports three industry formats: the 400ZR interoperable standard, the 400ZR+ multi-source agreement (MSA), and the OpenROADM MSA. (See tables below).

Click to read more ...

Hyperscalers' needs drive a new class of coherent DSP

Coherent digital signal processors (DSPs) companies have supported two families of coherent chips for some time. That's because no single coherent DSP can meet all the market's requirements.

The coherent DSP used for highest-performance optical transmissions must include advanced coding techniques, forward error correction, and a high symbol rate to send as much data as possible on a single wavelength and maximise reach.

Helen Xenos at NGON & DCI World

In contrast, a DSP for coherent pluggable modules needs to be power-efficient and compact to meet the optical module's power envelope and size constraints; a 400ZR QSFP-DD and a CFP2-DCO 400ZR+ being examples.

According to Ciena, now there is a need for a third category of coherent DSP for 1.6 terabit-per-second (Tbps) and 3.2Tbps transmissions over short distances for next-generation switch routers.

Click to read more ...

OFC highlights a burgeoning coherent pluggable market

A trend evident at the OFC show earlier this month was the growing variety of coherent pluggable modules on display.

Whereas a coherent module maker would offer a product based on a coherent digital signal processor (DSP) and a basic design and then add a few minor tweaks, now the variety of modules offered reflects the growing needs of the network operators.

Tom WilliamsAcacia, part of Cisco, announced two coherent pluggable to coincide with OFC.

The Bright 400ZR+ QSFP-DD pluggable form factor is based on Acacia’s existing 400ZR+ offering. It has a higher transmit power of up to 5dBm and includes a tunable filter to improve the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) performance.

Acacia’s second coherent module is the fixed wavelength 400-gigabit 400G ER1 module designed for point-to-point applications.

“I can understand it being a little bit confusing,” says Tom Williams, vice president of marketing at Acacia. “We have maybe five or six configurations of modules based on the same underlying DSP and optical technology.”

Click to read more ...

Building the data rate out of smaller baud rates

In the second article addressing the challenges of increasing the symbol rate of coherent optical transport systems, Professor Andrew Lord, BT’s head of optical network research, argues that the time is fast approaching to consider alternative approaches.

Coherent discourse 2

Coherent optical transport systems have advanced considerably in the last decade to cope with the relentless growth of internet traffic.

Professor Andrew Lord

One-hundred-gigabit wavelengths, long the networking standard, have been replaced by 400-gigabit ones while state-of-the-art networks now use 800 gigabits.

Increasing the data carried by a single wavelength requires advancing the coherent digital signal processor (DSP), electronics and optics.

It also requires faster symbol rates.

Moving from 32 to 64 to 96 gigabaud (GBd) has increased the capacity of coherent transceivers from 100 to 800 gigabits.

Last year, Acacia, now part of Cisco, announced the first 1-terabit-plus wavelength coherent modem that uses a 128GBd symbol rate.

Other vendors will also be detailing their terabit coherent designs, perhaps as soon as the OFC show, to be held in San Diego in March.

The industry consensus is that 240GBd systems will be possible towards the end of this decade although all admit that achieving this target is a huge challenge.

Click to read more ...