Microchip launches the first terabit physical layer device

Microchip Technology has unveiled a family of physical layer (PHY) Ethernet devices with a capacity of 1.2 terabits.

The Meta-DX1 PHY family comprises three devices that support three 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) channels, a dozen 100GbE channels or 24, 10GbE channels. 

“We are not aware of any PHY in the industry that supports more than one terabit of traffic,” says Stephen Docking, manager, product marketing at the communications business unit of Microchip. 

The company is also claiming another industry first in offering a PHY that supports the Open Internetworking Forum’s (OIF) Flexible Ethernet (FlexE) standard. 

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QSFP28 MicroMux expands 10 & 40 Gig faceplate capacity

• ADVA Optical Networking's MicroMux aggregates lower rate 10 and 40 gigabit client signals in a pluggable QSFP28 module
• ADVA is also claiming an industry first in implementing the Open Optical Line System concept that is backed by Microsoft 

The need for terabits of capacity to link Internet content providers’ mega-scale data centres has given rise to a new class of optical transport platform, known as data centre interconnect.

Source: ADVA Optical Networking

Such platforms are designed to be power efficient, compact and support a variety of client-side signal rates spanning 10, 40 and 100 gigabit. But this poses a challenge for design engineers as the front panel of such platforms can only fit so many lower-rate client-side signals. This can lead to the aggregate data fed to the platform falling short of its full line-side transport capability.

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Ethernet access switch chip boosts service support

The Serval-2 architecture. Source: Vitesse

Vitesse Semiconductor has detailed its latest Carrier Ethernet access switch for mobile backhaul, cloud and enterprise services. 

The Serval-2 chip broadens Vitesse's access switch offerings, adding 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports while near-tripling the switching capacity to 32 Gigabit;  the Serval-2 has 2x10 GbE and 12 1GbE ports.

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