Skorpios joins 100G CLR4 alliance
Skorpios Technologies, a fabless integrated silicon photonics system-on-a-chip company, has joined an alliance of companies supporting the 100G CLR4 CWDM specifications for data centre applications.
The 100G CLR4 Alliance was organised by a group of industry leaders, major data centre providers, networking companies and optical vendors who are in support of a transceiver based upon 100G CWDM (Coarse Division Multiplexing) LR4 (4 wavelengths) in the 1310nm window and 20nm spacing, hence "CLR4."
These include Intel and Arista, who spearheaded the creation. Other members of the two-dozen tech company consortium include Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Brocade, Oracle, Altera, SEMTECH and eBay.
Alliance partners believe that this approach will enable the rapid development and adoption of this market segment. Conversely, the lack of low-cost, 100G transceivers may become an impediment to the adoption of advanced CPUs, Flash, SSDs and switching silicon to build the next generation systems for cloud, HPC and enterprise data centres. This alliance may evolve into an MSA over time.
At the Optical Fibre Communications Conference (OFC 2014) last month, Skorpios announced and demonstrated products based on its proprietary Skorpios Template Assisted Bonding (STAB) process. In particular, Skorpios showcased its 100G 10km, CLR4 transceiver in a QSFP 28 package together with its silicon photonics-based micro-ITLA.
With these products, Skorpios is delivering on the promise of silicon photonics with some of the highest-density form factors, lowest-power dissipations and lowest-cost products available in the market.
"Joining this alliance of industry leaders enables quicker adoption of Skorpios' leading 100G QSFP28 product line," says Alfredo Viglienzoni, senior vice president of Sales, Marketing and Business Development for Skorpios. "Our novel technology platform allows us to deliver a single product that covers applications from a few hundreds of metres to 10 kilometres. At this point, the technology innovation, which has been the foundation of this company, evolves into product innovation as Skorpios ramps-up production. Our goal has always been to make Skorpios a company known for its innovative technology and highly differentiated products."
