Kotura rolls out 100G silicon photonics chips with WDM in dense QSFP package

OFC/NFOEC 2013, Booth #3618, USA: Kotura Inc. announced a silicon photonics industry first. The company is demonstrating its optical engine in a quad small form-factor pluggable (QSFP) package.

Kotura's Optical Engine uses Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), in which different signals can share the same path. Kotura is the only silicon photonics provider to offer WDM and now chalks up another industry first as the only silicon photonics provider to demonstrate WDM in a 100 gigabits per second (Gb/s) 4x25 QSFP package with 3.5 watts of power.

Kotura's Optical Engine provides an inexpensive, small form factor that reduces power consumption and provides a high level of integration. Consuming only 3.5 watts of power, Kotura is addressing the need for green solutions for 100G pipes desired by data centers and high performance computers (HPC).

The QSFP package has become the industry standard footprint for 4x10G and 40G Ethernet in data centers as well as 40G and 56G Infiniband in HPC. Kotura predicts that the same package will become the industry's volume standard for 100G networks in both data centers and HPC applications.

"The QSFP package enables our customers to fit 40 transceivers across the front panel of a switch, providing 10 times more bandwidth than CFP solutions," said Jean-Louis Malinge, Kotura president and CEO. "Because we monolithically integrate WDM and use standard Single Mode Fiber duplex cabling, our solution eliminates the need for expensive parallel fibers. No other silicon photonics provider can offer WDM in a 3.5 watt QSFP package."

A long-time innovator in WDM, Kotura has integrated all of the 100G optical and opto-electrical functions into two small chips. According to Malinge, the beauty of Kotura's WDM is that it can scale from four channels to many more, on the same chip. At 100G and higher, Kotura's customers need WDM to avoid the use of expensive ribbon fiber, parallel connectors and patch panels.

For large data centers, reaches of 30 meters to 2 kilometers are common and expensive ribbon fiber dominates the interconnect fabric costs. For Active Optical Cables and very short-reach links, Kotura also offers a parallel version of its 100G Optical Engine.

"The market for 40G transceivers in QSFP packages has grown much faster than expected," said Vladimir Kozlov, founder and CEO of LightCounting Market Research. "Squeezing 100G in the same QSFP package and reducing power consumption is critical for applications of 100 Gb/s optics in data centers."