Luxtera intros industry’s lowest power 40G AOC

CARLSBAD, USA: Luxtera, the worldwide leader in Silicon CMOS Photonics, announced at SC09 the debut of its low power, 40G Active Optical Cable (AOC), Blazar.

Leading the industry as the lowest power AOC on the market, the new Blazar utilizes over 30 percent less energy than competing products, improving overall data center power consumption and thermal efficiency. Low power Blazar also incorporates Intrusion Detection and Protection (IDP) features, which provide data centers with the security necessary to maintain data integrity.

Underscoring its new advanced offerings, Blazar was selected to serve as the cabling solution backbone for SCinet, the world’s fastest network, at this year’s SC09 conference.

Low power Blazar transceivers operate at less than 20mW/Gbps, well below power consumption of traditional multimode VCSEL optics, thus significantly reducing heat dissipation, operating expenses and the carbon footprint of data centers.

By combining CMOS Photonics technology and single-mode fiber, low power Blazar maintains a low price point while simultaneously supporting long reach connectivity of over 4,000 meters. Its high level of reliability and design flexibility make the low power AOC an ideal interconnect for High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters and high density applications such as blade servers.

“Our highly-integrated 40Gbps switch systems and switch blades are providing data centers with the computing power and density required for HPC and scaled data center applications, but with density come distance, power consumption and thermal design challenges,” said Shai Rephaeli, vice president of product engineering at Mellanox Technologies.

“Low power optical solutions, such as Luxtera’s low power Blazar, solve these challenges by minimizing power consumption while providing benefits in distance, weight and flexibility.”