Lumentum jolts the industry with Oclaro acquisition

Lumentum announced on Monday its plan to acquire Oclaro in a deal worth $1.8 billion.

The prospect of consolidation among optical component players has long been mooted yet the announcement provided the first big news jolt at the OFC show, being held in San Diego this week. 

Alan Lowe“Combined, we will be an industry leader in telecom transmission and transport as well as 3D sensing,” said Alan Lowe, president and CEO of Lumentum, on an analyst call discussing the deal.

Lumentum says their joint revenues totalled $1.7 billion with a 39% gross margin over the last year. And $60 million in synergies are forecast in the second year after the deal closes, which is expected to happen later this year. 

The $1.8 billion acquisition will comprise 56 percent cash and 44 percent Lumentum stock. Lumentum will also raise $550 million to help finance the deal.

“This is a big deal as it consolidates the telecom part of the component market,” says Daryl Inniss, business development manager at OFS Fitel and former market research analyst.

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Coherent gets a boost with probabilistic shaping

Nokia has detailed its next-generation PSE-3 digital signal processor (DSP) family for coherent optical transmission.

The PSE-3s is the industry’s first announced coherent DSP that supports probabilistic constellation shaping, claims Nokia.

Probabilistic shaping is the latest in a series of techniques adopted to improve coherent optical transmission performance. These techniques include higher-order modulation, soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC), multi-dimensional coding, Nyquist filtering and higher baud rates.

Kyle Hollasch

“There is an element here that the last big gains have now been had,” says Kyle Hollasch, director of product marketing for optical networks at Nokia.

Probabilistic shaping is a signal-processing technique that squeezes the last bit of capacity out of a fibre’s spectrum, approaching what is known as the non-linear Shannon Limit.

“We are not saying we absolutely hit the Shannon Limit but we are extremely close: tenths of a decibel whereas most modern systems are a couple of decibels away from the theoretical maximum,” says Hollasch.

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Rockley Photonics eyes multiple markets

Andrew Rickman, founder and CEO of silicon photonics start-up, Rockley Photonics, discusses the new joint venture with Hengtong Optic-Electric, the benefits of the company’s micron-wide optical waveguides and why the timing is right for silicon photonics. 

Andrew Rickman

The joint venture between Rockley Photonics and Chinese firm Hengtong Optic-Electric is the first announced example of Rockley’s business branching out.

The start-up’s focus has been to apply its silicon photonics know-how to data-centre applications. In particular, Rockley has developed an Opto-ASIC package that combines optical transceiver technology with its own switch chip design. Now it is using the transceiver technology for its joint venture.

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Verizon, Ciena and Juniper trial 400 Gigabit Ethernet

Verizon has sent a 400 Gigabit Ethernet signal over its network, carried using a 400-gigabit optical wavelength.

The trial’s goal was to demonstrate multi-vendor interoperability and in particular the interoperability of standardised 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) client signals.

Glenn Wellbrock“[400GbE] Interoperability with the client side has been the long pole in the tent - and continues to be,” says Glenn Wellbrock, director, optical transport network - architecture, design and planning at Verizon. “This was trial equipment, not generally-available equipment.” 

It is only the emergence of standardised modules - in this case, an IEEE 400GbE client-side interface specification - that allows multi-vendor interoperability, he says. 

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Ayar Labs advances I/O and pens GlobalFoundries deal

Silicon photonics start-up, Ayar Labs, has entered into a strategic agreement with semiconductor foundry, GlobalFoundries.

Alexandra Wright-GladsteinAyar Labs will provide GlobalFoundries with its optical input-output (I/O) technology. In return, the start-up will gain early access to the foundry’s 45nm CMOS process being tailored for silicon photonics.

GlobalFoundries has also made an investment in the start-up for an undisclosed fee.

“We gain, first and foremost, a close relationship with GlobalFoundries as we qualify our product for customers,” says Alexandra Wright-Gladstein, co-founder and CEO of Ayar Labs. “That will help us speed up availability of our product and have their weight of support behind us.”

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Books in 2017: Part 2

Gazettabyte has asked various industry executives to discuss the books they read in 2017. Here, Infinera's Dave Welch and Deutche Telekom's Yuriy Babenko provide their highlights.

Dave Welch, founder and chief strategy and technology officer at Infinera

One favourite book read this year was Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Great history about the makings of the US government and financial systems as well as a great biography. Another is The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wonderful discussion about the science and history of genetics.

Yuriy Babenko, senior expert NGN, Deutsche Telekom

As part of my reading in 2017 I selected two technical books, one general life/ philosophy title and one strategy book.

Today’s internet infrastructure design is hardly possible without what we refer to as the cloud. Cloud is a very general term but I really like the definition of NIST: Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

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5G-PON: SK Telecom’s unified distribution network

SK Telecom has detailed a networking architecture based on wavelength division multiplexing-passive optical network (WDM-PON) technology that it says will simplify the rollout of 5G while delivering significant cost savings.

The telecom operator has already deployed the networking architecture, dubbed 5G-PON, for its LTE network and is offering the design to the 5G network standards of the ITU-T.

“SK Telecom is already witnessing a great amount of cost reductions from the deployment of 5G-PON,” says Seungjoo Hong, manager of the Broadband Technology Lab at SK Telecom (pictured).

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