spacerSmart photonic integration

KAIAM :: Addressable Market

Bandwidth hungry applications are growing far faster than the increase in the speed of electronics. In fact, switching speeds of integrated circuits have generally leveled off due to power consumption issues. Thus to get higher data throughput, increasing the speed each pipe is frequently insufficient, and more pipes need to be added. The bandwidth problem is an issue at almost every length scale, and one sees increasing parallelism from the short links in between servers in the datacenter, to metropolitan and long haul links, and back into access networks. Multi-lane parallel transceivers that send and receive multiple lanes of data are becoming a necessity, and in order to meet the density requirements, some form of optical integration is required. KAIAM’s MEMS-based hybrid photonic integrated circuits provide a low cost solution in realizing high performance and compact transceivers.

As the interfaces to servers in data centers are moving form 1Gb/s to 10Gb/s, the top-of-rack switches that manage multiple servers need to handle many 10Gb/s lanes. The cluster switches, further up the hierarchy in the datacenter ideally need multiple 100Gb/s links. In the metropolitan networks, dense wavelength division multiplexing is a requirement, and low cost ways must be found to handle multiple 10Gb/s colored lanes. In the long haul, where spectral efficiency is a premium, the move is towards 100Gb/s per wavelength – using polarization multiplexing and phase modulation to get multiple bits per symbol. All this increase in complexity drives optical integration.

Currently the 100Gb/s Ethernet standard dictates four lanes of 25Gb/s wavelength multiplexed onto one fiber. An alternate configuration uses 10 lanes of 10Gb/s. At 40Gb/s, the standard requires four lanes of 10Gb/s in the coarse wavelength division multiplexed (CWDM) bands. These technologies all require multiple laser sources to be multiplexed together in the transceiver, requiring integration of lasers, multiplexers and other associated functions. The receiver needs the lanes to be demultiplexed which again requires sophisticated integration.

With multiple components in the same package, the optical alignment between the components is critical, especially, given the small optical modes of lasers and planar lightwave circuit (PLC) multiplexers. KAIAM MEMS-based hybrid alignment allows custom integrated circuits for each application. By assembling individual components that have previously been tested, the yield and the performance of the integrated module can be assured.

Example Application
In datacenters, servers are moving to 10Gb/s interfaces, increasing the bandwidth needs throughout the network. Market Diagram

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