In Memory of Lew Aronson

It is with great sadness to report that Lew Aronson passed away on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009. Lew had served at Finisar as Chief Scientist since 1999 and was well known and respected throughout the optics industry. Lew was the inventor of the XFP form factor, the mastermind behind the SFP form factor, and the driving force behind Laserwire™, the industry’s first 10G serial active optical cable. Lew was one of the true technical giants in this industry. He will be sorely missed as a member of the Finisar family.

C.wire active optical cable: The Story Behind the Name

Did you wonder how we came up with the name for C.wire™, the latest addition to our Active Optical Cable (AOC) family?

When we started our AOC family, the first product name, Laserwire™, was born in our engineering department. Finisar engineer Luke Ekkizogloy even developed the little symbol on top of the logo to illustrate a serial active optical cable.

The second member of our AOC family, Quadwire™, a 40 Gb/s parallel active optical cable, followed the naming structure of its predecessor. Since “Quad” equals four, we included 4 dots next to the logo as an easy way to illustrate four logical full duplex links, each capable of 10 Gb/s, running at an aggregate data rate of 40 Gb/s.

So, how did we come up with C.wire? This product was created to deliver 100 Gb/s+ connectivity, therefore, borrowing from the Roman numeral system, we used “C” to denote 100. At the same time, “C” also represents the Hexadecimal number for 12, the number of logical full duplex links in this parallel optical cable. And if this gets too confusing, you can also look to the logo for a hint. Each of the 12 lanes can drive 12.5 Gb/s of data with an aggregate bandwidth of 150 Gb/s for the cable, which is the highest bandwidth in the smallest and densest form factor available today.

It’s no secret that a lot of thinking goes into the naming of a new product and yes, we are looking forward to the challenge of developing our next logo and product name if you ever need more bandwidth…

By the way, “C.wire” beat the name D^2Wire – wonder why?

CPRI Wireless Standard and Optical Transceivers

There are a huge number of discussions going on in the world regarding wireless network deployments. Every new smart phone has wireless data capabilities, with 3G becoming main stream and next generation LTE currently being fielded. LTE is expected to enable data transfer rates to mobile devices between 15 and 100 times faster than 3G networks.

All of this wireless data ultimately needs to feed back into the network. With the explosion of wireless internet traffic, we are increasingly seeing a need to aggregate and backhaul wireless traffic using optical fiber links.

The Common Public Radio Interface specification, or CPRI (pronounced sip-ri) for short, is a standard for wireless backhaul. CPRI was a major initiative formed in 2003 by several well-known telecommunication companies: Ericsson, Huawei, NEC, Nortel, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Alcatel Lucent. The CPRI committee set out to define a new standardized interface for the interconnect point between the Radio Equipment (RE) and the Radio Equipment Controller (REC) within a base station.

Finisar has several SFP/SFP+ transceiver modules ideal for wireless and other base station applications, including CPRI. Finisar’s CPRI reference guide provides some useful information such as typical system architecture, supported radio standards, and the physical layer specification per the CPRI standard. In addition, the reference guide includes a Finisar compatibility product matrix that should make it easy to identify CPRI-ready products for wireless applications.

One of the great advantages of CPRI is its intent not to create yet another standard that would govern optical or electrical transceivers, but rather to leverage existing standards and technologies. For suppliers like Finisar, this means we can leverage the economies of scale of optical modules that are already in large volume production and combine those volumes with CPRI wireless applications. Furthermore, Finisar’s 4 Gb/s and 8 Gb/s products are already poised to easily handle the needs of next generation wireless equipment, including WiMAX and LTE.

Please feel free to share your comments on the CPRI wireless standard and optical transceivers.

Vertical Integration and the Early Days in the Optics Industry

This week we have an exciting guest blog post from Dr. Julie Sheridan Eng, Finisar’s VP of Transceiver Engineering. Julie has been in the Optical Communications business for over 20 years, almost from the time of the first fiber optics deployments. From my conversations with Julie, she has certainly seen lots of change in the optical communications component vendor supply base. This week I asked her to join us on Lightspeed to talk about those early days and Finisar’s decision to begin designing and manufacturing subcomponents of our products in-house rather than outsource, a strategy known as “vertical integration.”

***************************************************

In the early days, almost all the R&D in the optics industry was handled in the component divisions of the big systems houses like AT&T, Alcatel, Nortel and Lucent. Eventually, most of those system companies spun out or sold their optical components divisions. After some time, we saw the components themselves migrate from discrete, like lasers and detectors, to integrated solutions like transceivers and transponders.

Around the bubble time, the industry saw many optical component start-ups whose business model was to buy optical components and IC’s, and integrate them into transceivers and transponders to be sold to system manufacturers. What you may also remember is that that very few of them survived. One reason for this is that while it’s not hard to make a product based on all purchased components, it is almost insurmountable to use that strategy to follow a cost curve. If all the content is purchased, all you can do is eliminate components and push your vendors for cost reductions. If another company has a similar design and manufacturing capability, but has the components in-house, you can never build a product that is cost-competitive to theirs.

This is why Finisar and many of the other surviving optical components vendors today have embraced a “vertically integrated strategy” where critical elements such as lasers, detectors, and optical sub-assemblies are designed and manufactured in-house. Finisar is somewhat unique in that we have a world class internal Integrated Circuit design team. When I first arrived at Finisar about 6 years ago, I thought “we’re an optics house, why do we have IC design?” But you only had to look at the numbers to see that it makes sense. At Finisar, we evaluate all the opportunities and prioritize them based on return on investment. Going through this process we are able to decide which opto-chips, packages, and IC’s make sense to create internally. For those components that don’t make the top of our priority list (or for which we don’t have a specific expertise), we work with external suppliers. Over time, we have built a technology portfolio of opto-chips, optical packaging and integrated circuits that I think rivals anyone in the optics industry.

But this is a strategy that only works with volume. That is, there is a fixed cost associated with having in-house opto-chip or optical packaging design and manufacturing, or in-house IC design. If volume is low, that fixed cost will outweigh the savings gained by designing or making these parts internally compared to buying them from someone else. At Finisar, we have approximately 36% of the world’s transceiver volume, so it’s a strategy that makes sense for us.