I just came back from an interesting trip to Shanghai. Shanghai is becoming an important location for Finisar, as we have recently moved into a state-of-the-art optics manufacturing facility there. This site has 150,000 square feet of floor space, including a 30,000 foot clean room. We currently manufacture our passive products in this Finisar facility including our industry leading interleavers and isolators. Moving forward this will also be the key manufacturing site for products like Finisar’s parallel modules and linecards. A snapshot of our Shanghai facility is below.
Our active optical cable family, that is. Those of you who have been following the developments in this product line already know about Laserwire, our serial 10Gb/s cable and Quadwire, our parallel 40Gp/s cable offering. Today, at ISC ’09 in Germany, we unveiled C.wire, the industry’s first 150 Gbps parallel active optical cable for supercomputing and data center networking applications.
C.wire is based on the CXP form factor and uses fiber optic technology to transmit parallel high-speed data in 100G+ applications, such as Infiniband, 100G Ethernet and other proprietary high-speed interconnections. If you’re at ISC this week, you can stop by the Finisar booth #612 to see C.wire in action.
In other ISC ’09 demo news, Finisar will also be taking part in a 40Gb/s ecosystem demonstration alongside other leading vendors such as Voltaire, Intel and Sun Microsystems. Led by adapter and switch solution provider Mellanox, this demonstration is meant to highlight the capabilities of today’s latest high performance computing technologies.
More to come from ISC shortly.
Next week, Finisar heads to Hamburg, Germany for the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), Europe’s premier high performance computing event, taking place June 23rd – 26th. As the region’s leading conference dedicated to all things supercomputing, this year’s event will cover a range of topics, including cloud computing and high performance computing in aeronautics research and bioinformatics. In addition, there will be keynotes that are sure to inspire and spark discussion.
We’ll be there at Booth #612 showcasing our active optical cable family and demonstrating how they can optimize supercomputing applications. If you’re in the neighborhood, feel free to stop by. We look forward to seeing you there.
Stay tuned for more on ISC next week.
Located in the heart of Sydney, Finisar Australia is the home of Finisar’s Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS) product line. In this blog post, Dr. Simon Poole, one of the founders of Finisar Australia, outlines the interesting technology choices leading up to the development of the Finisar WSS and some of the thought processes and decisions made along the way.
***************************************************
When we first started working on Wavelength Selective Switches (WSS) back in 2003, the critical decision was on which technology platform should we base our WSS? At the time, there was no such thing as a WSS so we could start with a clean sheet of paper and look around to see what had been happening in related product lines. We looked firstly at what had been achieved in the Wavelength Blocker space, where liquid crystal technology seemed to be the ‘weapon of choice’ and also at optical cross-connects, where companies like Network Photonics, OMM, Xros and many others had pioneered the use of MEMS switching elements. A third alternative we considered, but rejected, were the use of planar technology (PLCs) as we could see that this was limited to degree-2 ROADMs. Read more »
Below I have tried to list some interesting Finisar factoids. Although I have spent several years at Finisar, some of these statistics still amaze me. The first set is interesting data from our laser fabs – these factoids put some of the things that we do in those fabs into perspective:
o The current density in our laser chips is 30 times greater than that in a lightning bolt.
o The optical power density at the facet of our lasers is 18 times greater than that at the surface of the sun.
o Inside the lasers, we grow our active layers flat to within half an atomic layer across a two inch wafer. This is like paving a road from California to New York flat to within an inch.
o The grating lines and spaces inside our lasers are 100 nm wide, similar to the features on a nearly state-of-art integrated circuit.
o In our reliability program over the last few years we have aged over 100,000 lasers, for more than 150 million device hours.
This next set of factoids speaks volumes:
o Based on marketshare data reported by Lightcounting in 2008, Finisar’s modules (including those shipped by Optium pre-merger) represented 36% of all worldwide transceiver sales in CY2007 –the highest in the industry.
o Last year, Finisar shipped more than 12 million modules worldwide.
o Finisar’s modules shipped last year had the capability of adding 38 Pbit/s of incremental bandwidth in networks worldwide.
o If you look at this another way, the incremental bandwidth capability of Finisar modules shipped in 2008 is the equivalent to one 500 kb/s DSL line per person on earth per month.
o However, perhaps a more meaningful statistic is the number of people on earth that use the Internet. According to global statistics, only 1,463,632,000 people in the world have access to the Internet (roughly one-fifth of the population). Thus, the amount of incremental bandwidth capability of Finisar modules shipped in 2008 was the equivalent to one 2.5 Mb/s DSL line per Internet User on earth per month.
If you know of other similar and interesting factoids in our industry, feel free to share them on this blog.
Optics | Rafik Ward | 
June 26, 2009 2:36 pm | 
Comments (0) 
