Tuesday
Jun072011
LTE-Advanced - a mind map
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 12:23PM 
A mind map of the emerging 3GPP LTE Release 10 standard, also known as LTE-Advanced. For a pdf, click here
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 12:23PM Monday
May302011
R&D: At home or abroad?
Monday, May 30, 2011 at 10:00AM ECI Telecom chose to set up its latest R&D site in Israel. Gazettabyte met with Chaim Urbach, ECI’s head of global R&D operations, to discuss why it decided to locate its latest site in Israel, and how the company can compete with the leading telecom players that have considerably larger R&D teams and budgets.
Omer Industrial Park in the Negev, Israel; the location of ECI Telecom's latest R&D centre.
Friday
May272011
Fibre-to-the-FPGA
Friday, May 27, 2011 at 11:12AM Briefing: Optical Interconnect
Part 1: FPGAs
Programmable logic chip vendor Altera is developing FPGAs with optical interfaces. But is there a need for such technology and how difficult will it be to develop?
FPGAs with optical interfaces promise to simplify high-speed interfacing between and within telecom and datacom systems. Such fibre-based FPGAs, once available, could also trigger novel system architectures. But not all FPGA vendors believe optical-enabled FPGAs’ time has come, arguing that cost and reliability hurdles must be overcome for system vendors to embrace the technology
“One of the advantages of using optics is that you haven’t got to throw your backplanes away as [interface] speeds increase.”
Craig Davis, Altera
Thursday
Apr212011
Terabit Consortium embraces OFDM
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:42AM A project to develop optical networks using terabit light paths has been announced by a consortium of Israeli companies and universities. The Tera Santa Consortium will spend 3-5 years developing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based terabit optical networking equipment.
“This project is very challenging and very important”
Shai Stein, Tera Santa Consortium
Thursday
Apr142011
Chinese optical component vendors set for change
Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 8:58AM China’s optical component firms must adapt if they are to match their Western counterparts in market reach, company ambition and technology portfolios. These are the findings of a report - China: The New Land of Opportunity - on the local optical component (OC) industry by market research firm, LightCounting.
“If [Chinese optical component] companies get $100m from an IPO, they have the resources to really do things”
Vladimir Kozlov, LightCounting
Tuesday
Apr122011
Optical engines bring Terabit bandwidth on a card
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 3:18PM Avago Technologies is now delivering to customers its 120 Gigabit-per-second optical engine devices.
Such a parallel optics design offer several advantages when used on a motherboard. It offer greater flexibility when cooling since traditional optics are normally in pluggable slots at the card edge, furthest away from the fans. Such optical engines also simplify high-speed signal routing and electromagnetic interference issues since fibre is used rather than copper traces.
Figure 1: Fourteen 120Gbps MiniPods on a board. Source: Avago Technologies
Monday
Apr112011
OFC announcements and market trends
Monday, April 11, 2011 at 10:57AM Avago Technologies, Finisar and Opnext spoke to Gazettabyte about market trends and their recent OFC/NFOEC announcements.
More compact transceiver designs at 10, 40 and 100 Gigabit, advancements in reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) technology and parallel optical engine developments were all in evidence at this year’s OFC/NFOEC show held in Los Angeles in March.
“MSAs are designed by committee, and when you have a committee you throw away innovation and you throw away time-to-market”
Victor Krutul, Avago Technologies
