Video: 4x25G DFB-Based CFP Transceiver Demo at OFC 2011

OFC 2011 Wrap-Up: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed and Finisar Blue!

This week’s post is contributed by Finisar guest blogger, Tony Pearson.

Last week took me and approximately 10,000 of my closest colleagues and friends to arguably the largest annual fiber optic components show, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) this year in Los Angeles, California.

Pre-show attention this year was focused as much, if not more, on the choice of venue than the anticipation of what’s new and exciting in the industry. The reason was simple, most veterans of OFC who attended when it was last held in L.A. in 2004, have a story of alleged ‘near death’ experiences getting to/from the show floor to hotels, restaurants or parking lots. While there are unconfirmed stories that several would be attendees did not travel to the conference this year for this very reason, the show did appear well attended and all the usual suspects were well represented on the show floor. From my own experience this year, I’d say the show organizers came through on their promise to provide at least a safe location with newer amenities close by. The pre-show fears were thankfully unfounded at least for those of us lodging at the nearby L.A. Live neighborhood. I don’t believe there’s a venue in mainland U.S. that would fully measure up to the San Diego Gaslamp Quarter where we’ve all been spoiled for the last few years.

On the business front this was another busy and successful show for Finisar, beginning with a fantastic booth location, another hit for the Grammys (excuse the pun) at the Finisar Customer event, as well as multiple meetings with customers, suppliers, and partners. This year’s demonstrations in the Finisar booth included Flexgrid™ technology in the WSS, 100GE over 20km using Finisar 25G DFB’s in the pluggable CFP form factor and an 80km link demo in the SFP+ form factor for 10GBase-ZR and SONET/SDH OC-192 protocols. I’d like to extend a personal thanks to all who visited with us and invited us to enjoy the fruits of their labors over the last year and specifically for the show.

There is always some sadness at the end of OFC/NFOEC as we all sit on planes, trains and automobiles headed home, that within our community of Fiber Warriors, there is just never enough time to both discuss all topics in detail nor just socialize a little with those we sometimes only see at trade shows or bump into in lobbies, meeting rooms, standards and MSA meetings. There is often precious little time to walk the floor just to see what everyone’s been working on this year and chosen to share publicly. With the few minutes I managed to set aside to take a look around, I was once again pleased to see an industry focused on the NEW: many demonstrating 25G optical links, 100G offerings in standards based form factors, parallel optics and AOC solutions, the OLD(er): high volume and ever growing small form factors pluggable modules continuing the march upward in bandwidth, and of course in the spirit of innovative collaboration pervasive in our industry, the BORROWED: several booths presenting live demos based on collaborative solutions such as the Agilent/Finisar collaborations at the Agilent booth for both 16x FC and 100G live demos.

With the OFC/NFOEC Registration area sponsored by Finisar this year and a booth location front and center on the trade show floor, this was an industry event filled with Finisar BLUE.

Finisar Booth at OFC 2011

Friendly Finisar Staff at the 100GE CFP module demonstration

ECOC Tradeshow Recap and the Importance of Flexgrid™

Just got back from the ECOC tradeshow, or as I joked at our customer event on Tuesday night, the ECDC trade show – “European Colorless Directionless Contentionless” Conference.

Despite losing my suitcase and having to rush-out to buy some of the latest Italian fashions (can you say slim fit?), it was a good industry show.

Finisar was no stranger to the ROADM architecture theme with our new Flexgrid™ technology demo. Flexgrid is a WSS software feature we believe will be critically important to carriers in their deployments of ROADMs in the future.

As described in our recent press release, Flexgrid™ WSS technology enables dynamic control of channel center frequency and channel bandwidth within a WSS, from 50 GHz to 200 GHz in 12.5 GHz steps, with no penalty on any aspect of WSS performance. Flexgrid™ draws upon the inherent flexibility and performance of Finisar’s Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) optical engine which we believe will address carrier demands for flexible bandwidth-capable ROADMs in next-generation networks. LCoS technology enables a WSS to be very flexible with many features including the ability to optimize (or contour) the channel shape of each individual wavelength and provide configurable dispersion compensation for best transmission performance.

Flexgrid becomes very interesting when one looks to the next Ethernet data rate as the following example shows.

If you assume the next data rate beyond 100G will be 400G, then:

Obviously 400G will require an advanced modulation format, so if you assume:
• Modulators and electronics are limited to 30G symbols/s
• 16 QAM give 4 bits/symbol
• Two polarizations x two wavelengths gives another factor of four
• FEC takes away 20%
• 30x4x2x2= 480Gb/s. Take away 20% = 400Gb/s Ethernet

Based on this 16-QAM, 30GHz, dual polarization modulation format:
• 60GHz is needed for the signal
• Add 10GHz channel boundaries on each side of the signal
• Allow 3-5GHz between signals (including laser drift)

This means the bandwidth required to transport a 400GE signal is somewhere around 85GHz.
One way to transport this would be to use a 100GHz grid since 85GHz would fit within the 100GHz channel. However, moving to 100GHz channel spacing to accommodate the 400G channel means that the carrying efficiency of the fibre actually drops for other (lower bandwidth) signals which would normally be carried on 50GHz channels. Since signal heterogeneity is likely to be a feature of future networks, and carriers are looking to maximize fiber carrying capacity (and hence minimize cost/Mbit/km), then it is clearly not an option to just return to a 100GHz grid.

Furthermore, the actives associated with transporting 400GE (say using a 16-QAM dual polarization modulation format) are likely to be expensive. Thus, we will spend a very significant amount on optics to increase the throughput on a given fiber in a way in which spectral bandwidth is not optimized. However, if a network operator has already deployed a ROADM using Flexgrid™ technology, they could preset that specific wavelength to 87.5GHz granularity using a very simple software command. Voila, you have a spectrally efficient 400GE wavelength that increases the spectral efficiency of fiber by a factor of 2.3 (130% increase as opposed to 100% increase using 100 GHz channels) as well as providing efficient bandwidth allocation for other types of traffic and hence maximizing the carrying capacity of a given fibre route. This should ultimately also make the cost associated with upgrading to 400GE significantly less expensive for a carrier.

People ask why should we worry about deploying ROADMs for 400GE? As an industry, we are just starting to deliver 100GE. Well, as Glenn Wellbrock at Verizon stated “we like to deploy our ROADM equipment for 10 years”. If you assume that 400GE will likely start to ship in the next 5 years (pretty likely considering that the standard efforts for 100GE started in 2006 and now 4 years later, we are shipping 100GE), then not deploying Flexgrid would be very short-sighted. It would mean that in 5 years time, a carrier would have to rip out old ROADMs to support 400GE – a very expensive proposition.

Any comments are welcome!

ISC 2010 Wrap-Up –What’s Hot in Supercomputing

This week’s blog post comes from Katharine Schmidtke, Finisar’s Strategic Marketing Manager.

I had the pleasure of attending the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC) event May 31-June 3, in Hamburg Germany. The show was well attended and appeared to have doubled in size from last year. In attendance were all the major industry suppliers and leading technology providers such as Mellanox, QLogic, Voltaire, NVidia, HP, IBM, Cray, Oracle, AMD, Intel, LSI, Supermicro and STEC. Key themes included supercomputing, storage and networking. Of those, hot trends discussed were cloud and parallel computing as well as the future developments to come in the next 10 years. The trend to higher bandwidth continues, with the IBTA announcing the latest roadmap which adds a new datarate at FDR (14 Gbps) in addition to EDR (26 Gbps). InfiniBand is targeting 300 Gbps by 2011 in a 12 lane format running at 26Gbps per lane.

And as I sat through the presentations and spoke to some of the folks on the show floor, it became evident that there are two central themes underpinning all the major business and HPC initiatives – latency and flexibility. Reducing latency is key for supercomputers, while flexibility is the driver in cloud computing. NVidia made quite a splash with their Tesla C2050 GPUs which are used to improve data crunching speeds in many supercomputers, including the new #2 supercomputer – the Nebulae system built by Dawning in China. Dr. Wilfried Oed from Cray shared some of the secrets in the new XE-6 supercomputer including the new Gemini network card which he admits is “more than just a router” by increasing processing speeds using a clever non-blocking routing system.

On the news front, the biannual 35th edition of the Top 500 supercomputer list was released. The U.S. continues to take the lead in the number one spot with Jaguar, the fastest supercomputer system used for The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Computing Facility. Trailing close behind and ranked second on the list is Nebulae, China’s fastest system worldwide.

Other noteworthy technical initiatives point to Intel, who dominates the high-end process market with roughly 82% of all systems and over 90% of quad-core based systems. IBM recoups the lead in market share by total systems and overall performance from Hewlet-Packard (HP). And exciting for Finisar – we were part of the 120 Gb/s InfiniBand demonstration at this year’s event. Check out the press release issued by the HPC Advisory Council to learn more.

Until next year’s ISC show, Auf Wiedersehen, as they say in German!

Video: Finisar EWP Wavelength Selective Switch Demo at OFC 2010