Infinera Chips for Optical Networking Achieve Market Success

Infinera (News - Alert), a company that provides digital optical networking systems to telecommunications carriers globally, recently completed shipping of more than 10,000 dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) line cards, representing more than one Petabit/second of network capacity.

 

Also, the photonic integrated circuits (PICs) sold by Infinera have surpassed a cumulative total of 100 million hours of operation in live networks worldwide without any PIC failures proving high reliability of its photonic integration technology, reports the company.

 

The PICs by Infinera are made integrating 60 devices onto a pair of monolithic chips, including lasers, modulators, photoreceivers and DWDM multiplexers, offering a total capacity of 100 Gigabits/second (Gb/s) per chip.

 

The company manufactures and extensively tests its PICs at its own fab in Sunnyvale, California, which deliver significant advantages in terms of scalability, cost, space consumption, power consumption, and reliability due to the high level of integration involved in the manufacturing process.

 

Infinera has achieved high reliability by aiming at designing PICs that deliver significant network benefits while at the same time show high quality and cost-effectiveness in volume manufacture.

 

According to the test results carried out by the company at its fab, the Infinera transmit PIC, with 50 optical devices, has equivalent reliability to that of many single active optical components deployed in networks today. Also, at the network level, Infinera PICs eliminate more than 90 percent of the fiber couplings in a traditional optical network to deliver significant improvements in network reliability, says the test report.

 

The company has continuously enhanced the manufacturing efficiency of its wafer fab, which has increased 60-fold since Infinera began volume manufacture in 2004.

 

Infinera had announced earlier this year that now it plans to introduce commercially produced PICs with a data rate of 400/500 Gb/s, which will reportedly have more than 200 integrated optical devices integrated on a single chip. The company aims at doubling its capacity per chip every three years, backed by continued scaling in the capacity of photonic integrated circuits.

 

Dave Welch, chief marketing and strategy officer at Infinera said that the increase in efficiency is very significant because it shows that photonic integrated circuits advance similarly to electronic integrated circuits, where silicon chips have been able to deliver very high quality while increasing complexity and functionality year after year, due to the learning curve in the manufacturing process.