Luxtera Launches OptoPHY Optical Transceivers

Luxtera, which specializes in Silicon CMOS Photonics, has announced the launch of its OptoPHY product line.

 

Company sources said that Luxtera’s family of Printed Circuit Board or PCB mounted optical transceivers will enable low-cost optical connectivity. Electronics and optics are combined in a single CMOS chip. This allows deployment on the motherboard enabling reliable point-to-point connectivity.

 

The new product line is expected to enhance Luxtera’s contributions to the optical industry and helps in the evolution of optical technology from pluggable modular solutions to chip-on-board solutions leading to opto-electronic system-on-a-chip integration in future.

 

Luxtera will be able to replace legacy optical modules with high density, integrated chip-on-board transceivers. The solution is available in one and four channel configurations and the company plans to include 12 configurations by next year. OptoPHY offers 10 Gbps per channel data rates producing high bandwidth parallel connectivity.

 

It also features high footprint density per Gigabit enabling a flexible system design so that the transceivers can be placed inside a system to maximize front panel connector density. This also simplifies thermal and EMI management. The OptoPHY consumes only 20 megawatts of power per single gigabit, company sources confirmed.

 

OptoPHY leverages the capabilities of Active Optical Cable or the AOC product line and it provides data centers with greater reach of up to 4,000 meters while legacy multimode fiber VCSEL optics allows only 100 meter ranges. This allows for a flexible data center layout within a multi-building campus environment. The transceivers offer long reach for on-board optics making the solution most suitable for enterprise networking, InfiniBand, Storage, Ethernet and backplane applications.

 

“By utilizing Luxtera’s Silicon CMOS Photonics technology platform, the OptoPHY product line breaks cost and power consumption barriers of traditional optics and positions us to ultimately deliver optical interconnects at the price points of copper,” said Greg Young, CEO of Luxtera.

 

“Using the same chip design platform as our award-winning AOC, OptoPHY successfully enables optical deployment on a motherboard to offer a new direction for the architecture of system interconnects,” said Young.

 

Luxtera proposes to demonstrate OptoPHY at SC09 to take place next week in Portland, Ore. The company is presently sampling one channel LUX6001 and four channel LUX6004 OptoPHY chips with production to start next year.