NeoPhotonics announces shipment of PIC modulators
NeoPhotonics, a designer and manufacturer of advanced hybrid photonic integrated circuit based modules and subsystems for bandwidth-intensive, high speed communications networks, today announced that it had shipped early limited volumes of its new 53 Gbaud Linear Driver ICs designed to work with Silicon Photonics based Mach-Zehnder Modulator chips in 100G per wavelength datacenter optical transceiver modules. These high performance Driver ICs are manufactured using NeoPhotonics proven, in-house, Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) wafer fabrication facility and are available in both Single and Quad formats.
Silicon Photonics (SiPho) has emerged as a promising technology for optical data transmission over intermediate reaches of approximately 500 meters (DR) inside datacenters. Several vendors have designed 53 Gbaud SiPho modulator chips which can modulate four separate optical signals using PAM4 encoding to achieve 100Gbps (billion bits per second) on four separate channels, resulting in a total of 400Gbps for the module. These SiPho modulator chip designs generally require a larger voltage swing than is normally produced by the CMOS electronics used in the PAM4 DSP chip. NeoPhotonics Linear Driver IC amplifies the electrical signal so that it is of an appropriate voltage to operate the SiPho modulator and produce the desired optical signal. NeoPhotonics Quad Driver chip combines four separate drivers in a single compact, low power chip designed to support compact pluggable modules such as OSFP and QSFP-DD.
These SiPho based transceivers also need a high power laser to provide the initial input light to the modulator. NeoPhotonics also offers such high power, non-hermetic lasers and has begun volume shipments. These high power DFB lasers are qualified to the non-hermetic test compliance with Telcordia GR-468-CORE Issue 2.
"We are pleased to announce the initial shipments and availability of our 53 Gbaud GaAs Driver ICs just before the Fiber Optic Expo in Tokyo, as these products have been designed and manufactured at our NeoPhotonics Semiconductor GK division in Hachioji City of Tokyo," said Tim Jenks, Chairman and CEO of NeoPhotonics. "Our 53 Gbaud Driver ICs and our high power, non-hermetic DFB lasers, high speed photo-detectors, trans-impedance amplifiers and EML lasers provide designers with several of the key optical components required for the highest speed datacenter transceivers," concluded Mr. Jenks.
