Infinera goes multi-terabit with its latest photonic IC

In his new book, The Great Acceleration, Robert Colvile discusses how things we do are speeding up.

In 1845 it took U.S. President James Polk six months to send a message to California. Just 15 years later Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address could travel the same distance in under eight days, using the Pony Express. But the use of ponies for transcontinental communications was shortlived once the electrical telegraph took hold. [1]

The relentless progress in information transfer, enabled by chip advances and Moore's law, is taken largely for granted. Less noticed is the progress being made in integrated photonic chips, most notably by Infinera.    

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Next-generation coherent adds sub-carriers to capabilities

Briefing: DWDM developments

Part 2: Infinera's coherent toolkit 

Source: Infinera

Infinera has detailed coherent technology enhancements implemented using its latest-generation optical transmission technology. The system vendor is still to launch its newest  photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and FlexCoherent DSP-ASIC but has detailed features the CMOS and indium phosphide ICs support.

The techniques highlight the increasing sophistication of coherent technology and an ever tighter coupling between electronics and photonics.    

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Ovum Q&A: Infinera as an end-to-end systems vendor

Infinera hosted an Insight analyst day on October 6th to highlight its plans now that it has acquired metro equipment player, Transmode. Gazettabyte interviewed Ron Kline, principal analyst, intelligent networks at market research firm, Ovum, who attended the event.    

Q. Infinera’s CEO Tom Fallon referred to this period as a once-in-a-decade transition as metro moves from 10 Gig to 100 Gig. The growth is attributed mainly to the uptake of cloud services and he expects this transition to last for a while. Is this Ovum’s take?  

Ron Kline, OvumRK: It is a transition but it is more about coherent technology rather than 10 Gig to 100 Gig. Coherent enables that higher-speed change which is required because of the level of bandwidth going on in the metro.

We are going to see metro change from 10 Gig to 100 Gig, much like we saw it change from 2.5 Gig to 10 Gig. Economically, it is going to be more feasible for operators to deploy 100 Gig and get more bang for their buck.

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ECOC 2015: Reflections

Gazettabyte asked industry executives what trends and highlights they noted at the recent European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) event, held in Valencia. Here are three views.

Valery Tolstikhin, head of a design consultancy, Intengent

ECOC was a big show and included a number of satellite events, such as the 6^th European Forum on Photonic Integration, the 3^rd Optical Interconnect in Data Center Symposium and Market Focus, all of which I attended. So, lots of information to digest. 

My focus was mainly on data centre optical interconnects and photonic integration.

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Verizon tips silicon photonics as a key systems enabler

Verizon's director of optical transport network architecture and design, Glenn Wellbrock, shares the operator’s thoughts regarding silicon photonics.

Part 3: An operator view

Glenn Wellbrock is upbeat about silicon photonics’ prospects. Challenges remain, he says, but the industry is making progress. “Fundamentally, we believe silicon photonics is a real enabler,” he says. “It is the only way to get to the densities that we want.”

Glenn Wellbrock

Wellbrock adds that indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs) can also achieve such densities.

But there are many potential silicon photonics suppliers because of its relatively low barrier to entry, unlike indium phosphide. "To date, Infinera has been the only real [indium phosphide] PIC company and they build only for their own platform,” says Wellbrock.

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Optical networking: The next 10 years

Feature - Part 2: Optical networking R&D

Predicting the future is a foolhardy endeavour, at best one can make educated guesses.

Ioannis Tomkos is better placed than most to comment on the future course of optical networking. Tomkos, a Fellow of the OSA and the IET at the Athens Information Technology Centre (AIT), is involved in several European research projects that are tackling head-on the challenges set to keep optical engineers busy for the next decade.

“We are reaching the total capacity limit of deployed single-mode, single-core fibre,” says Tomkos. “We can’t just scale capacity because there are limits now to the capacity of point-to-point connections.”

Source: Infinera 

The industry consensus is to develop flexible optical networking techniques that make best use of the existing deployed fibre. These techniques include using spectral super-channels, moving to a flexible grid, and introducing ‘sliceable’ transponders whose total capacity can be split and sent to different locations based on the traffic requirements.

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Heading off the capacity crunch

Feature - Part 1: Capacity limits and remedies

Improving optical transmission capacity to keep pace with the growth in IP traffic is getting trickier. 

Engineers are being taxed in the design decisions they must make to support a growing list of speeds and data modulation schemes. There is also a fissure emerging in the equipment and components needed to address the diverging needs of long-haul and metro networks. As a result, far greater flexibility is needed, with designers looking to elastic or flexible optical networking where data rates and reach can be adapted as required.

Figure 1: The green line is the non-linear Shannon limit, above which transmission is not possible. The chart shows how more bits can be sent in a 50 GHz channel as the optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) is increased. The blue dots closest to the green line represent the performance of the WaveLogic 3, Ciena's latest DSP-ASIC family. Source: Ciena.

But perhaps the biggest challenge is only just looming. Because optical networking engineers have been so successful in squeezing information down a fibre, their scope to send additional data in future is diminishing. Simply put, it is becoming harder to put more information on the fibre as the Shannon limit, as defined by information theory, is approached.

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