Reflections on OFC 2017

Mood, technologies, notable announcements - just what are the metrics to judge the OFC 2017 show held in Los Angeles last week?

It was the first show I had attended in several years and the most obvious changes were how natural the presence of the internet content providers now is alongside the telecom operators, as well as systems vendors exhibiting at the show. Chip companies, while also present, were fewer than before.

Source: OSA

Another impression were the latest buzz terms: 5G, the Internet of Things and virtual reality-augmented reality. Certain of these technologies are more concrete than others, but their repeated mention suggests a consensus that the topics are real enough to impact optical components and networking.

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IoT will drive chip design and new styles of computing

Looking back 20 years hence, how will this period be viewed? The question was posed by the CEO of imec, Luc Van de hove, during his opening talk at a day event imec organised in Tel-Aviv.

For Van den hove, this period will be seen as one of turbulent technological change. “The world is changing at an incredible rate,” he says. “The era of digital disruption is changing our industry and this disruption is not going to stop.”

Luc Van den hove

It was the Belgium nonoelectronics R&D centre’s second visit to Israel to promote its chip and systems expertise as it seeks to expand its links with Israel’s high-tech industry. And what most excites imec is the Internet of Things (IoT), the advent of connected smart devices that turn data into information and adapt the environment to our needs.

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Stitching together disaggregated chips

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has begun work on a 112-gigabit electrical interface to connect chips in a multi-chip module.

The ultra-short-reach electrical interface for multi-chip modules adds to the OIF's ongoing CEI-112G project, started in August 2016, to develop a 112 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) serial electrical interface for next-generation optical modules. 

Source: Gazettabyte, OIF data. The year 2018 is an estimate.

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Presentation slides of the book

A set of slides summarising the book, Silicon Photonics: Fueling the Next Information Revolution. 

To download the slides, please click here.     

The Open ROADM MSA adds new capabilities in Release 2.0

The Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) for open reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADM) group expects to publish its second release in the coming months. The latest MSA specifications extend optical reach by including line amplification and adds support for flexible grid and lower-speed tributaries with OTN switching.

Xavier PougnardThe Open ROADM MSA, set up by AT&T, Ciena, Fujitsu and Nokia, is promoting interoperability between vendors’ ROADMs by specifying open interfaces for their control using software-defined networking (SDN) technology. Now, one year on, the MSA has 10 members, equally split between operators and systems vendors.

Orange joined the Open ROADM MSA last July and says it shares AT&T’s view that optical networks lack openness given the proprietary features of the vendors’ systems.

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Acacia looks to co-package its coherent PIC and DSP-ASIC

• Acacia Communications is working to co-package its coherent DSP and its silicon photonics transceiver chip. 

• The company is also developing a digital coherent optics module that will support 400 gigabit. 

Acacia Communications is working to co-package its coherent DSP and its silicon photonics transceiver chip. The line-side optical transceiver company is working on a digital coherent optics module that will support 400 gigabits.

Acacia announced last November that it was sampling the industry’s first CFP2 Digital Coherent Optics (CFP2-DCO) that supports 100- and 200-gigabit line rates. The CFP2-DCO integrates the DSP and its silicon photonics chip within a CFP2 module, which is half the size of a CFP module, with each chip packaged separately.

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Silicon Photonics Merging Ahead

"Silicon photonics has made considerable progress in a relatively short time to emerge as an important systems technology whose time has come"

An opinion piece on silicon photonics in EE Times.