Kotura rolls out first 100G silicon chip for WDM
Kotura has announced what it claims is a silicon photonics industry first.
The company has develped an Optical Engine in a Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) package. Kotura's Optical Engine uses Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), in which different signals can share the same path.
Kotura says it is the only silicon photonics provider to offer WDM and now chalks up another industry first as the only silicon photonics provider to demonstrate WDM in a 100 gigabits per second (Gb/s) 4 x 25 QSFP package with 3.5 watts of power.
Kotura's Optical Engine provides an inexpensive, small form factor that reduces power consumption and provides a high level of integration. With its low power consumption, Kotura is addressing the need for green solutions for 100G pipes desired by data centres and high performance computers (HPC).
The QSFP package has become the industry standard footprint for 4 x 10G and 40G Ethernet in data centres as well as 40G and 56G Infiniband in HPC. Kotura predicts that the same package will become the industry's volume standard for 100G networks in both data centres and HPC applications.
"The QSFP package enables our customers to fit 40 transceivers across the front panel of a switch, providing 10 times more bandwidth than CFP solutions," says Jean-Louis Malinge, Kotura president and CEO. "Because we monolithically integrate WDM and use standard Single Mode Fibre duplex cabling, our solution eliminates the need for expensive parallel fibres. No other silicon photonics provider can offer WDM in a 3.5 watt QSFP package."
A long-time innovator in WDM, Kotura has integrated all of the 100G optical and opto-electrical functions into two small chips.
According to Malinge, the beauty of Kotura's WDM is that it can scale from four channels to many more, on the same chip. At 100G and higher, Kotura's customers need WDM to avoid the use of expensive ribbon fibre, parallel connectors and patch panels.
For large data centres, reaches of 30m to 2km are common and expensive ribbon fibre dominates the interconnect fabric costs. For Active Optical Cables and very short-reach links, Kotura also offers a parallel version of its 100G Optical Engine.
"The market for 40G transceivers in QSFP packages has grown much faster than expected," comments Vladimir Kozlov, founder and CEO of LightCounting Market Research. "Squeezing 100G in the same QSFP package and reducing power consumption is critical for applications of 100 Gb/s optics in data centres."
