fibresystems.org blog
February 10, 2009
Terabit chip revisited
CUDOS team
Over the last week, plenty of news outlets have been running stories on an optical waveguide that performs 640 Gbit/s demultiplexing. We’re not ignoring the story, it’s just that we covered it last summer. You can read about it here:
Photonic chip chases terabit processing.
As the article explains, there’s plenty of work to be done to make a prototype, let alone a product. As far as I can see, the main development since last summer is that the researchers have now published their work in a journal. But although this is only an R&D; project, I think it’s a very interesting one.
February 9, 2009
Nortel shelves MEN sale
In an email to industry editors, Nortel says that the previously announced divestiture of its Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) business has been put on hold while the company is under Chapter 11 credit protection. Ryan Saxby Hill from Nortel’s media relations team writes:
I wanted to drop you a note to confirm a point that is flying around today:
The previously announced potential MEN divestiture has been put on hold. These plans have been put on hold while the overall business plan is being developed to emerge from this process a more competitive and focused company, which will be subject to the approval of creditors and the courts. Through the restructuring process, our goal is to proactively address the Company’s current challenges and ultimately strengthen the business to ensure its long-term viability.
The MEN business is among the strongest in the industry with an installed base of over 410,000 network elements, and with ground-breaking technology and opportunities moving forward like 40G/100G.
# We have a total of 42 wins and have received over 55 orders to date
# Since the September announcement of the intention to explore the divestiture of M.E.N., we have closed over 20 new 40G deals
# We are targeting the delivery of our 100G solution by the end of 2009
This point came up in a couple of discussions this week and I wanted to get you firm response as soon as I could. I won’t be able to provide much more by way of clarification, but feel free to let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks,
Ryan
February 2, 2009
Snow joke!
It’s always the same here in the UK: a light covering of snow and the country grinds to a halt. According to a report on the BBC website, mobile phone networks are buckling under the strain, and internet sites have crashed because people want to know silly things like if they can get to work, and if the London Underground is running.
Surely the Underground is running, most of it is er, underground?
We’ve had about two inches of snow where I live, so the schools are closed, and my multi-tasking skills are being brought to bear on the situation. While writing this blog entry, I am keeping half an eye on my children sledging down the street, which fortunately is aligned perfectly with the window of my office.
Seriously, however, I’m a bit shocked that a snap of cold weather can have such an impact on the internet. Is the infrastructure now running so close to capacity that a small spike in traffic can bring the internet to its knees?
More snow is due tomorrow. It’s possible that all communications in the UK will be cut.
January 28, 2009
Whatever happened to… Andrew Rickman
In an intriguing juxtaposition of events, yesterday the Financial Times ran an article on Andrew Rickman, founder of components vendor Bookham, who took the company from upstart start-up to stock market darling. Yesterday, of course, being the day that a rather more world-weary Bookham agreed to merge with Avanex (see Bookham, Avanex: the merger is on).
Rickman, says the article, started Bookham from a spare room in the family house, and named the company for the village where it all started. His new venture, as an angel investor, is also run from home, only this time home is a stately pile in a Wiltshire village called Rockley. And guess what? His latest company is called Rockley Ventures.
Rockley Ventures has 10 investments including Green Biologics, an industrial biotech company whose technology converts waste by-products into fuels, Blue Whale Mail, a software start-up that aims to better BlackBerry with e-mail services that run on standard mobile phones, and silicon photonics company Kotura (see Kotura adds Bookham founder to board).
November 20, 2008
Dutch find FTTH courage
The blogosphere is buzzing today with the news that KPN and Reggefiber plan to spend €6–7 billion in an ambitious project to roll out fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) across the whole of The Netherlands over the next 5–7 years.
The Netherlands is currently 12th in the global FTTH rankings, which are compiled every six months by the three FTTH Councils, with fibre reaching 1.4% of the population. This development will certainly move the country up the list.
Of course, it helps that the Netherlands is a relatively small country, with a high population density — the highest in Europe, not counting “island” states like Malta and Gibraltar. There are around 7 million homes to pass, which makes the cost per home around around €1000, and the carriers plan to foot the bill entirely by themselves, without government aid.
The original article breaking the news in Dutch paper Trouw is here, the headline of which translates rather ungracefully as “KPN and Reggefiber stabbing 6 billion in national glasnet”.
November 19, 2008
To infinity and beyond
Artist concept of interplanetary internet. Credit: NASA/JPL
Perhaps being a settler on Mars won’t be so tough after all — at least you’ll still be able to check your email, if research at NASA comes to fruition.
The US space agency has successfully tested the first deep-space communications network modelled on the internet. In a series of experiments that started last month, NASA engineers transmitted dozens of space images from Earth to a NASA science spacecraft located more than 20 million miles (32 million km) from Earth, and back again, using a network consisting of 10 nodes.
“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Vint Cerf, who is Google’s vice-president and chief internet evangelist, was instrumental in creating the technology, called Disruption Tolerant Networking, or DTN. The DTN software protocol differs from the normal Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communication suite because it does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection.
The interplanetary internet must be robust enough to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space. For instance, the delay in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half to 20 minutes at the speed of light. Longer communications blackouts can result when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or during solar storms.
Unlike TCP/IP on Earth, DTN does not discard the data packets if a destination path can’t be found. Instead, each network node keeps custody of the information as long as necessary until it can safely communicate with another node. This store-and-forward method means that information does not get lost when no immediate path to the destination exists. The information always gets to the end-user — eventually.
DTN will be a boon for space communications. “In space today, an operations team has to manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it,” said Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN Experiment Operations Center at JPL. “With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically.”
DARPA is very interested in DTN too, for military applications. And to my mind, this research sounds like it could be quite useful on Earth as well, especially in areas that currently suffer from poor or intermittent network connectivity.
November 7, 2008
Gemfire on ice
Could Gemfire be the first casualty of the credit crunch? The integrated optics firm is reportedly running short of cash as investors get cold feet and customers push out their orders.
As a result it has abruptly closed down its facility in Livingston, Scotland, with the loss of 250 jobs, says this BBC report. (You may recall that the Livingston plant is the home of the former silica-on-silicon firm Kymata, which was sold to Alcatel Optronics, then to Avanex, and finally to Gemfire.)
The fiesty Scots don’t appear to be very happy at this treatment, claiming that the Livingston outfit was the most profitable of the three Gemfire locations, and the order book was full, according to this article in Scottish daily The Herald.
However, UK labour laws apparently don’t allow the option of putting the company on ice for two weeks, the tactic the company has employed at its two US locations to see it through the tight spot.
If — and I’d say that’s a fairly big if in the current climate — Gemfire manages to conjure up additional funding, either in the form of a new investor or a bridge loan from customers, then it may try to reopen the Livingston factory.
October 27, 2008
Innovating in a crisis
In the midst of the turmoil in the banking industry, and the seemingly endless stream of bad news from Wall Street, it’s easy to get stuck in a negative mindset. But a couple of articles that I saw recently highlight the fact that one man’s bad fortune can be another man’s opportunity.
For a kickoff, Paul Graham, essayist and co-founder of Viaweb, the first application service provider, writes about why to start a start-up in a bad economy. Many folk are predicting that this economic slowdown could be as bad as the seventies, he notes… that’s when Apple and Microsoft were founded.
Investment guru George Gilder also provides some welcome relief from the doom and gloom with an article in Forbes in which he talks about an upcoming creativity boom. “The real source of all growth is human ingenuity and entrepreneurship, which often thrive in the worst of times,” Gilder points out. Which company emerged victorious from the telecoms crash of the early 2000s? Google.
October 16, 2008
ECOC: the 40G supply chain
A few more things I saw at ECOC are worth noting, albeit belatedly, and a bunch of them were about 40 Gbit/s components.
In his market focus presentation, Kim Papakos from Tellabs highlighted single source components as a real problem for systems vendors wanting to build 40 and 100 Gbit/s networking gear. Ideally companies like Tellabs would like at least three sources on the market, so that if one supplier goes belly up, there are still multiple sources available. That requirement is passed down to them from their operator customers.
Loi Nguyen and Lian Zhao from Inphi
The lack of suitable off-the-shelf parts for 40 Gbit/s has often been cited as one of the factors that delayed the adoption of 40 Gbit/s networking. Nevertheless, it surprised me to find that there are still quite a lot of 40 Gbit/s components that are only made by one company, and some that simply aren’t available at all.
A case in point, Inphi and Sierra Monolithics joined forces to create the industry’s first reference design for 40 Gbit/s DQPSK (differential quadrature phase-shift keying) modulation. The booth demo showed interoperability of Inphi’s 40 Gbit/s modulator driver with Sierra Monolithics’ SerDes multiplexer/clock multiplier unit.
As I understand it, Inphi is the sole supplier of DQPSK modulator drivers, while Sierra Monolithics is currently the sole supplier of 40 Gbit/s SerDes. That’s because high-speed, high-voltage chips are difficult to make in silicon, so vendors have to resort to other materials systems.
Inphi’s DQPSK modulator driver for example, which has to output two streams of 20 Gbit/s at an amplitude of 8 V, is made out of gallium arsenide. (For comparison, networking chips in other roles typically require 1 V.) Meanwhile Sierra Monolithics makes its present generation of chips out of silicon germanium using IBM’s 7HP process.
The supply situation will improve over time of course — CoreOptics announced a 40 Gbit/s SerDes chip earlier this year, and AMCC is possible also working on one. But right now the components supply chain isn’t complete at 40 Gbit/s, let alone 100 Gbit/s.
In fact, Loi Nguyen, co-founder and vice president of technology for Inphi, told me: “Nobody has a TIA [transimpedance amplifier] for 40 Gbit/s DP-QPSK [dual-polarisation quadrature phase-shift keying].” The TIA sits on the recieve side in the equivalent position to the modulator driver on the transmit side, and amplifies the weak electrical signal coming in from an optical detector before passing it to the SerDes.
DP-QPSK is the modulation format selected by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) for 100 Gbit/s components, which is supposed to hit the market in 2010, and yet it’s still not possible to get standard parts for the previous speed incarnation. Clearly components vendors have a lot of work to do.
October 8, 2008
OIDA Photonic Integration Forum
fibresystems.org is delighted to welcome Jeff Ferry, Director of Communications for Infinera, and a former journalist, as a guest blogger this week. Jeff will be reporting on the OIDA’s Photonic Integration Forum, which is the first industry conference dedicated to the commercial development of photonic integration technology. As such it marks an important step forward for this technology area. The conference has been co-organised by OIDA and Infinera.
The conference attracted an impressive 60 experts in photonic integration, says Jeff, filling the room to capacity at the picturesque Monterey Hotel and Spa, perched up against, and partially built out over, Monterey Bay, 100 miles south of San Francisco. So without further ado, over to Jeff…
Tuesday, 7 October, OIDA Photonic Integration Forum, Day One
By Jeff Ferry
Photonic integration
The two most interesting themes of the conference’s first day were scalability and power consumption. The debate over scalability turned into a discussion of integration on indium phosphide vs. integration on silicon. The indium phosphide (InP) supporters, led by Infinera, have the benefit of having large numbers of photonic integrated circuits deployed by real customers. According to the chart shown by Infinera co-founder Dave Welch, Infinera has accumulated 101 million hours of PICs running in live networks without a single failure, with each PIC pair integrating 60 devices. That translates to a FIT rate (reliability measure) of 9, which is better than many single lasers and modulators in the market today. “Everything gets better when you integrate, reliability, yield, performance, and costs,” said Welch.
Later in the day, Infinera PIC engineer Randy Salvatore provided some insight into how Infinera has achieved its reliability and yields, describing the six stage statistical process control methodology that Infinera borrowed from the silicon industry and applied at its PIC fab. According to Salvatore, when compared to silicon chips and specifically Intel’s well-documented history, Infinera has in the last two years made progress equivalent to six years’ worth of Intel progress, moving from defect density numbers equivalent to Intel’s in 1987 to numbers comparable to Intel in 1993. This, said Salvatore, is the silicon learning curve successfully applied to InP.
Professor John Bowers of University of California at Santa Barbara emerged as the most charismatic advocate of silicon photonics. He showed slides on his UCSB team’s progress in several areas, including high-quality photodetectors made from silicon germanium, hybrid lasers made from a combination of III-V materials and silicon, and on the manufacturing side, they’ve reduced the time required to bond the two materials together from 12 hours to as low as 10 minutes — an important step towards making the technology practical, reliable, and commercial. Bowers said that silicon CMOS technology makes it possible to reduce device size to the point where it becomes possible to get as many as 125,000 die sites (i.e. chips) on an 8 inch wafer. All those developments go towards making silicon photonics PICs more cost-effective than any other material, said Bowers. “Infinera is doing a great job, but the potential for lots more scaling exists,” Bowers said. “The platform for VLSI PICs exists. Millions of devices [on a chip] is possible.”