OFC/NFOEC 2010

Gazettabyte asked the views of several attendees at OFC/NFOEC 2010 to reflect on the show. In particular what developments or trends struck them as noteworthy, what they learnt and what gives them reason for optimism?

Here is a selection of their views.

 

“We heard again and again, that the internet service providers such as Google are still looking for solutions for their future bandwidth demand”

Andreas Umbach, u2t Photonics

 

OFC highlights

For many the story of the show was 40Gbps and 100Gbps long-haul transport. 

“Of the many announcements I thought Opnext’s component technology and product announcements were notable as a big bet on bleeding-edge R&D by an established components player,” says Scott Schube, senior analyst and strategist at market research firm, LightCounting.

The developments Schube highlights include Opnext’s 100Gbps SerDes, 100Gbps DSP for coherent receivers, and various optical modules for 100Gbps, along with its field trial with AT&T announced before the show.

Andreas Umbach, CEO of u²t Photonics, notes the industry acceptance of dual-polarisation QPSK as the standard for 100Gbps.  Oclaro also highlights the Optical Internetworking Forum’s (OIF) work towards a single solution, to avoid the proliferation of solutions that occurred at 40Gbps. “Most view this as a good sign, but it does remove some of the flexibility to introduce new innovations,” says Chris Clarke, vice president strategy and chief engineer at Oclaro. 

OFC/NFOEC 2010 also marked the return of the system vendors, according to Karen Liu, vice president, components and video technologies at market research firm Ovum.

“There were two big trailers on the floor from Huawei and Ciena-Nortel. Each was a complete demo room showing multiple systems interoperating,” she says. “Ciena-Nortel with Corning had a demo involving 3000km of fibre.”

But others disagree. “The box makers have really pulled back at this show compared to those in the past,” says Neal Neslusan, a consultant at PhiBos Consulting. “With Supercomm now finally dead it makes one wonder what is the target show for the telecom box makers.”

 

“The biggest thing was the general sense that bandwidth on the fibre is no longer plentiful”

Karen Liu, Ovum 

 

 

 

 

One datacom demonstration highlighted by LightCounting was Avago’s microPOD 120Gbps parallel optical modules shown as part of an IBM supercomputing blade. “Reflex Photonics and others have showed similar technology before, but Avago’s announcement shows that we might be getting close to true commercialization of “optics on board” products,” said Schube.

Liu was also taken by IBM’s water-cooled processor board with the Avago optical interconnect based on a novel connector made by injection-molded high-precision lensing: “There were 28 modules, 120Gbps each, on the board.”

 

What else besides 40 and 100Gbps?

Passive Optical Networks (PON) received huge attention, says David Menashe, vice president and chief scientist at RED-C Optical Networks. “There is a lot of activity around next-generation PON architectures including higher rates and longer reach, merging of access and metro networks and reducing the number of central offices,” he says

LightCounting highlights continuing innovation at 10Gbps which, it says, still has years of market dominance ahead of it. Schube notes the demos from several IC vendors of smaller, lower power, more integrated 10G PHYs and framers, as well as two companies introduced long-reach SFP+ modules, and Finisar’s demonstration of a new tunable XFP module.

“The tunable XFP seemed to gain general market acceptance with several suppliers announcing upcoming releases,” says Sinclair Vass, senior EMEA director at JDS Uniphase. He also noted a trend towards 1x23 type wavelength-selective switch (WSS) architectures with market agreement emerging as to what is required.

 

Learnt

For David Smith, CTO of CIP Technologies, the general acceptance of coherent detection as the solution for 100Gbps and beyond means that the two most important technologies driving the future of the industry will be photonic integration needed to realise the complex optics, and advances in electronic DSP technology to reap the flexibility and capacity.

“From the longer term research perspective orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in its various guises increasingly seems to be the way people will see all this capability being harnessed,” he says

“40Gbps DPSK and DQPSK will live on and, in fact, grow very nicely,” says Neslusan. “I also learnt that at 40 and 100Gbps, the coherent detection offerings will not necessarily be adopted across the board; there is significant life for direct detection at both 40 and 100Gbps, specifically in the metro.”

“The most vocal component companies appear to have a long way to go to reign-in to a 100Gbps product; the claims seem to be significantly beyond the capability to commercialise in the near-term,” says Oclaro’s Clarke.  “There is also a growing consensus that vertical integration will be increasingly valued going forward.”

“The biggest thing was the general sense that bandwidth on the fibre is no longer plentiful,” says Ovum’s Liu, highlighting how Cedric Lam of Google referred to it and Glenn Wellbrock from Verizon also made reference to it in the context of wanting a move to “gridless” - no longer being bound by the ITU’s rigid wavelengths used for DWDM - for high speed transmission.

 

Surprises

JDS Uniphase and RED-C stress that technology tends to move incrementally and as such did not see any ‘quantum leaps’.  One interesting observation, according to JDS Uniphase, was the reduction in OFDM papers in 2010 compared to 2009.  But it warns not to read too much into it: “Two points don’t make a trend,” the company said.

Eve Griliches, managing partner at ACG Research was surprised by how OFC was “overrun” by content providers: “A new breeze blowing in town was how it felt,” she says.

“It is noticeable that the direction for the industry is increasingly being set by web service companies such as Google and Facebook, says CIP’s Smith.“These people are now the drivers of the capacity demand and it is interesting that their requirements and vision does not quite align with that of the long haul operators that traditionally set the tone at OFC.”

 

Reasons for optimism?

“There was plenty,” says RED-C’s Menashe. 100Gbps and coherent detection has injected a lot of energy into the industry, he says. Combined with the expected growth in access networks, this should lead to healthy growth for several years.

LightCounting is encouraged that the industry is moving to more complex modulation and detection schemes despite the near- and even medium-term economic case for 100Gbps components is suspect, says Schube.  Such developments define a technology roadmap for at least another decade of network capacity doubling every 18 months.

“We heard again and again, that the internet service providers such as Google are still looking for solutions for their future bandwidth demand,” says u2t’s Umbach.

 

“The component vendor landscape for 40G and 100G is turning out to be just like that at the beginning of 10G – that is to say, very overcrowded”

Scott Schube, LightCounting

 

JDS Uniphase argues that from the attendance of mainly larger stable suppliers it is clear that the ecosystem has fully evolved from the “excessive speculation by outside forces” which caused and broke the bubble. The current situation doesn’t mean that the industry is “a full picture of health or profitability”, it said, but predictability and stability may be returning.

For CIP, the show was as busy as previous OFCs but its serious leads were up by 30%. Interest was much more focussed on custom designs and volumes for solid commercial applications rather than one-off blue sky projects, it said.

“This year marked the en masse return of the "optical gadget" suppliers at OFC, specifically from China,” says Neslusan. “I consider this a good sign.”

 

Did you attend OFC? Is there something noteworthy that you'd like to highlight?

A brief review of some of the eye-catching announcements emerging from this year’s OFC/NFOEC being held in San Diego this week.

The Infinera Express: Infinera's 80-foot-long truck-based mobile demo unit, is at OFC/NFOEC. Infinera is part of a demo of live 100 GigE data traffic with Juniper Networks, Finisar, Opnext and Reflex Photonics. The truck also contains Infinera’s ATN metro edge platform.

Demonstrations and displays

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) is displaying components and hardware as part of its integrated transmitter and receiver initiative for 100Gbps transponders.  OIF member companies taking part include Fujitsu Optical Components, NEC, NeoPhotonics, Opnext, Picometrix, Sumitomo Osaka Cement, TriQuint Semiconductor, u2t Photonics and Vitesse Semiconductor.

Opnext is demonstrating a real-time 100Gbps DWDM link using a single wavelength coherent receiver. This follows Opnext’s recent participation in AT&T’s 100Gbps trial. Opnext has already detailed its 100Gbps silicon germanium multiplexer IC and last week it announced it had partnered with A/D converter (ADC) specialist Mobius Semiconductor to develop a CMOS-based polarisation multiplexing quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK) receiver chip. The integrated circuit (IC) includes ADCs, a digital signal processor and forward error correction (FEC).

 

40 and 100Gbps line side transmission

Until recently, Nortel (acquired by Ciena) was the sole vendor with 40Gbps coherent technology. Last week Fujitsu announced that it has added 40Gbps coherent technology to its Flashwave 7500 platform. Now at OFC, CoreOptics has announced a 40Gbps coherent module and is demonstrating the technology with a Nokia Siemens Networks' system. CoreOptics claims its 40Gbps 300-pin MSA delivers a 2,000km reach without requiring dispersion compensation modules.

NeoPhotonics has announced integrated coherent receivers for 40 and 100Gbps. The receiver combines an integrated dual 90° hybrid coherent mixer with four balanced photodiodes and linear amplifiers in a package (see photonic integration feature).

There are also more 40Gbps DQPSK products being announced at OFC.

Opnext is showing its 40Gbps DQPSK 7x5inch transponder while u²t Photonics has unveiled its integrated DQPSK receiver which is now sampling. The company claims that integrating two balanced receivers in a single package saves up to 70% board space.

Oclaro last week announced that its 40Gbps DQPSK transponder had been qualified to Telcordia standards.

Lastly, Infinera has announced it has recruited John McNicol, a senior engineer involved in the development of Nortel’s coherent technology. “He will be critically involved in the development of Infinera’s next-generation optical networking systems,” says the firm, indicating Infinera’s intention to development a coherent-based system.

 

40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)

Transceiver firm ColorChip can claim a first by implementing the 40GBASE-LR4 standard in a QSFP module. The industry is working to decrease the size of the 40GbE modules. The first implementations use the CFP module while system vendors want smaller modules to increase the interfaces that can be placed on a card.

40GBASE-LR4 CFPs were first announced six months ago around ECOC 2009 and since then Hitachi Cable has developed a 40GBASE-LR4 X2 module. Now ColorChip has used its system-on-glass technology to squeeze the design into a QSFP. ColorChip has said it will deliver samples later this year with volume manufacturing beginning in 2011.

There is also an interoperability demonstration of 100GbE CFP modules involving Infinera, Juniper, Finisar and Opnext. The demonstration includes Juniper’s T1600 core router and Infinera’s DTN optical system and 100GBASE-LR4 modules from Finisar and Opnext. Reflex Photonics’ 100GBASE-SR10 CFP modules are also used as part of the demonstration.

 

Passive Optical Networks

NeoPhotonics has announced 10G PON transceivers for the GPON and EPON standards. The GPON pluggable transceivers supports 10Gbps in the downstream and 2.5Gbps burst mode transmission in the upstream with link budgets of 29 dB and 31 dB.  The EPON transceivers support 10Gbps in the downstream and 1Gbps in the upstream direction and have a link budget up to 30.5 dB. 

The GPON and EPON optical line terminal (OLT) transceivers used at the central office are implemented using the XFP while the optical networking unit (ONU) transceivers at a PON's end points are implemented using an SFP+ form factor. 

 

Parallel optics

Avago Technologies has announced a miniature 12-channel MicroPOD parallel optics transmitter and receiver modules that it is promoting as a follow-on to SNAP 12. The modules, measuring 7.8mm (L) by 8.2 mm (W) by 3.9mm (H), support lane rates of up to 12.5 Gbit per second for an aggregate bandwidth of 150Gbps. 

Avago claims the MicroPOD modules are compliant with the IBTA 12xQDR Infiniband and IEEE 802.3ba 100GBASE-SR10 specifications. Avago also announced it has developed with IBM new miniature low power 120Gbps 12-channel modules for IBM’s upcoming POWER7 supercomputing systems.

Luxtera is using OFC to demonstrate its OptoPHY board-mountable optical transceivers. The company’s CMOS-based optical engine is being shown supporting 40GbE.

Reflex Photonics has launched two surface-mount 12-channel optical engines. The LightABLE devices take up 2.3 cm² of board space and consume 42 mW of power per channel, transmitting or receiving at 120Gbps.

 

OFC tweets

To follow OFC/NFOEC on Twitter search on #ofcnfoec.

You can also follow analysts Andrew Schmitt of Infonetics (@aschmitt), Eve Griliches of ACG Research (@EveGr) and journalists Craig Matsumoto of Light Reading (@craigmatsumoto) and Stephen Hardy of Lightwave (@lightwaveonline).

Stephen Hardy also has an OFC show blog