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Tuesday
Mar122024

DustPhotonics raises funding for 800G and 1.6T modules

  • DustPhotonics has raised $24 million in funding.
  • The start-up has taped out its 200 gigabit-per-lane optical chip.
  • DustPhotonics expects the 1.6-terabit module market to ramp, starting year-end.

Ronnen Lovinger

DustPhotonics, which develops chips for transmit optical sub-assemblies (TOSAs) for 400 and 800-gigabit pluggable optical modules, has raised $24 million. The funding extends its Series B funding round.

"When you start ramping up products, you have to iron out the creases around supply chain, production, and everything else," says Ronnen Lovinger, CEO of DustPhotonics.

DustPhotonics has several customers and a backlog of orders for its 400 and 800-gigabit photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The company has also taped out its 200 gigabit-per-lane chip and will have products later this year.

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Thursday
Mar072024

imec's novel ADC promises faster sampling rates

The analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue converters (ADCs/DACs) are like the equals sign in mathematics.

Joris Van Driessche

The equals sign is taught as showing two sides of an equation being the same. But really, it is a gateway between two worlds. The same applies to the ADC and DAC, which equate between the analogue and digital worlds.

Progress in wireline communications, whether client-side optics or coherent optical modems at 800 gigabits and soon 1.6 terabit, means converters must sample at higher rates.

In February, at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, imec detailed a proof-of-concept chip design that promises to advance high-speed ADCs.

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Friday
Feb162024

OFC 2024 reflects a mature industry with new offshoots

  • The three General Chairs preview the upcoming Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference and discuss photonics developments and trends.
  • The General Chairs' role is to choose the plenary speakers, programme theme, and conference schedule.
  • OFC takes place during March 24th-28th in San Diego, CA.*

Photonics, at least for traditional applications, has become a mature industry. So says Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, one of this year's OFC General Chairs.

Professor Dimitra Simeonidou

By traditional, Simeonidou is referring to classical optical communications.

But she also stresses new developments: the use of optical fibres for environmental sensing, optics for satellites, and quantum.

"Quantum is like a micro-OFC," says Simeonidou. "You have issues from technology to subsystem to system applications now appearing in the OFC programmes."

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Friday
Feb092024

The OIF's coherent optics work gets a ZR+ rating  

The OIF has started work on a 1600ZR+ standard to enable the sending of 1.6 terabits of data across hundreds of kilometres of optical fibre. 

The initiative follows the OIF's announcement last September that it had kicked off 1600ZR. ZR refers to an extended reach standard, sending 1.6 terabits over an 80-120km point-to-point link. 

1600ZR follows the OIF's previous work standardising the 400-gigabit 400ZR and the 800-gigabit 800ZR coherent pluggable optics.      

The decision to address a 'ZR+' standard is a first for the OIF. Until now, only the OpenZR+ Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) and the OpenROADM MSA developed interoperable ZR+ optics.

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Tuesday
Jan302024

Optical transmission: sending more data over a greater reach

  • Keysight Technologies' chart plots the record-setting optical transmission systems of recent years.

Source: Keysight Technologies

The chart, compiled by Dr Fabio Pittalá, product planner, broadband and photonic center of excellence at Keysight, is an update of one previously published by Gazettabyte. 

The latest chart adds data from last year's conferences at OFC 2023 and ECOC 2023. And new optical transmission achievements can be expected at the upcoming OFC 2024 show, to be held in San Diego, CA in March.

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Wednesday
Jan242024

Using LED-based parallelism for fast optical interconnects

Avicena Tech has demonstrated what it claims is the world's smallest one-terabit optical transceiver. And the company will reveal more about how it is advancing its optical technology for volume production at the upcoming OFC event in San Diego in March.

Christoph Pfistner demonstrating the microLED-based 1Tbps interface at Supercomputing 23 in Denver, Colorado.

The interface technology uses compact light emitting diodes (LED). The interface uses an array of these microLEDs that emit light vertically into a bundle of multimode optical fibres.

Avicena demonstrated its 1 terabit-per-second (Tbps) interface at the recent Supercomputing 23 show in Colorado last November. Its interface used 304 LED-based optical channels, each carrying 3.3 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) of data for a total bandwidth of one terabit.

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Friday
Dec292023

Drut tackles disaggregation at a data centre scale

  • Drut’s DynamicXcelerator supports up to 4,096 accelerators using optical switching and co-packaged optics. Four such clusters enable the scaling to reach 16,384 accelerators.
  • The system costs less and is cheaper to run, has lower latency, and better uses the processors and memory.
  • The system is an open design supporting CPUs and GPUs from different vendors. 
  • DynamicXcelerator will ship in the second half of 2024.

Bill Koss (L) and Jitender Miglani.

Drut Technologies has detailed a system that links up to 4,096 accelerator chips. And further scaling, to 16,384 GPUs, is possible by combining four such systems in ‘availability zones’.

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