Coherent wins award for innovative photonics product
Coherent, a technology company developing optical communications solutions, has announced that one of its products has won the 2023 ECOC Exhibition Industry Award for Most Innovative Product in the category of Innovative Photonics Component. The product is Coherent’s 200G four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) distributed-feedback laser and Mach-Zehnder modulator (DFB-MZ), combined monolithically in a photonic integrated circuit (PIC). The company says that this PIC enables 200G per lane in both retimed and linear pluggable 800G and 1.6T transceivers.
“We are very proud to receive this award for the DFB-MZ, which to our knowledge we were the first to demonstrate in March 2023,” said Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi, Chief Marketing Officer. “We have combined into one PIC the functional elements and integration experience of several of our most advanced devices, which are each breakthrough innovations on their own. This PIC incorporates our knowledge from electroabsorption-modulated lasers, IQ modulators for coherent applications, and tuneable lasers with Mach-Zehnder modulators. It will enable higher-performance, longer-reach PAM4 optical links.”
According to Coherent, the DFB-MZ features a channel-specific chirp control that provides excellent dispersion management, and also supports wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), including local area network (LWDM) and coarse (CWDM) wavelength plans. The company added that a cooled DFB-MZ supports LWDM for reach up to 10 km, while an uncooled DFB-MZ supports CWDM for shorter reaches.
