Infinera introduces roadmap for photonic integration
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 25 February 2008, 20:30 IST
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Bangalore: Infinera (Nasdaq: INFN), a provider of digital optical networking systems to telecommunications carriers worldwide, will unveil its vision of the future of photonic integration for telecom networks at next week's OFC/NFOEC 2008, the annual trade show and conference for the optical networking industry. The vision focuses on capacity per chip as the key metric for enabling the efficient scaling of optical transport networks and maximizing total fiber capacity. Infinera envisages steady growth in the number of devices integrated onto a chip, enabling the aggregate data rate per chip to double roughly every three years. Infinera anticipates the next increment in commercially available photonic integrated circuits (PICs) to be PICs with capacity of 400 Gigabits/second (Gb/s) per chip. This increase in capacity will be accomplished with PICs integrating ten wavelengths operating at 40Gb/s per wavelength, using Differential Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (DQPSK) advanced modulation. Based on expected scaling in PIC capacity per chip, Infinera anticipates producing PICs with an aggregate capacity per chip of 4 Terabits/second within ten years. Scaling of network capacity alone will not meet the needs of carriers; the scaling of the network requires the simultaneous and proportionate advancement of capacity, cost, power consumption, size, reliability and complexity. For the past decade the industry has focused on data rate per wavelength as a key measure of progress to address these challenges. While the jump in data rate per wavelength from 2.5 Gb/s to 10 Gb/s led to a reduction in cost per gigabit-kilometer, the move from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s addressed the question of spectral efficiency but has not adequately addressed issues of cost, power, reliability, and complexity associated with an increased number of optical components. Infinera believes that increasing capacity per chip not only raises the data rate of the system, but also enables the system to reduce cost, space consumption, power consumption, and complexity while improving the reliability of the system by reducing the number of components or packages within each line card Today's state of the art in photonic integration is the Infinera PIC with a capacity per chip of 100 Gb/s integrated in the Infinera DTN Digital ROADM and Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) platform. These PICs consolidate more than 60 optical components integrating ten wavelengths operating at 10 Gb/s per wavelength. Increasing capacity per chip is made possible through the application of several important technologies, including; integration of more wavelengths on a single chip; use of advanced modulation techniques to code more data to each wavelength, and expanding the range of PIC operation across the full fiber spectrum.

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