Infinera's XR optics pluggable plans

Infinera’s coherent pluggables for XR optics will also address the company’s metro needs.

Coherent pluggables now dominate the metro market where embedded designs account for just a fifth of all ports, says Infinera.

Robert Shore

“As we grow our metro business, we need our own pluggables if we want to be cost-competitive,” says Robert Shore, senior vice president of marketing at Infinera.

Infinera’s family of pluggables implementing the XR optics concept is dubbed ICE-XR.

XR optics splits a coherent optical signal into Nyquist sub-carriers, each carrying a data payload. Twenty-five gigabits will likely be the sub-carrier capacity chosen.

XR optics can be used for point-to-point links where all the sub-carriers go to the same destination. But the sub-carriers can also be steered to different destinations, similar to how breakout cables are used in the data centre.

With XR optics, a module can talk to several lower-speed ones in a point-to-multipoint arrangement. This enables optical feeds to be summed, ideal for traffic aggregation applications such as access and 5G.

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Infinera’s ICE6 sends 800 gigabits over a 950km link

Infinera has demonstrated the coherent transmission of an 800-gigabit signal across a 950km span of an operational network.

Robert ShoreInfinera used its Infinite Capacity Engine 6 (ICE6), comprising an indium-phosphide photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and its FlexCoherent 6 coherent digital signal processor (DSP). 

The ICE6 supports 1.6 terabits of traffic: two channels, each supporting up to 800-gigabit of data. 

The trial, conducted over an unnamed operator’s network in North America, sent the 800-gigabit signal as an alien wavelength over a third-party line-system carrying live traffic.

“We have proved not only the state of our 800-gigabit with ICE6 but also the distances it can achieve,” says Robert Shore, senior vice president of marketing at Infinera.

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Infinera prepares for first ICE6 coherent DSP samples

Infinera has taped out its 7nm CMOS FlexCoherent 6 digital signal processor (DSP) and expects samples of the coherent chip in the next fortnight.

“We are ready to start fabricating prototype modules,” says Robert Shore, senior vice president of marketing at Infinera (pictured).

The DSP, along with Infinera’s photonic integrated circuit (PIC) that was demonstrated at the OFC show held in March, will be integrated into a module that supports two wavelengths, each capable of supporting up to 800 gigabits of data. 

The company expects to have a prototype of the 1.6-terabit Infinite Coherent Engine 6 (ICE6) module by year-end, while the first ICE6-based products are scheduled for the second half of 2020.

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