News

17 March 2010

 

Kotura demos first silicon photonics mux/demux for 0.5Tb/s transmission

Kotura Inc of Monterey Park, CA, USA, has been designing and manufacturing application-specific silicon photonics components for the communications, computing, sensing and detection markets for more than four years, has demonstrated its Echelle grating mux and demux for 500Gb/s wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) applications. The 0.5 Terabit-per-second demonstration marks completion of the second year of the three-year program TERAPICS, and was performed at InP-based optical chip and component maker CyOptics Inc of Lehigh Valley, PA, USA (Kotura's partner in the program).

Together with CyOptics, in October 2007 Kotura was awarded $5.9m by the US Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology Program (ATP) to fund the three-year TERAPICS project for the development of next-generation Terabit photonic integrated circuits that use a combination of monolithic and hybrid integration to reduce hundreds of individual components in 100–1000Gb/s Ethernet systems to less than 10 components. Kotura aimed to develop integrated silicon photonics chips to serve as the mounting platforms for laser and receiver arrays, as well as providing multiplex and de-multiplex functions.

Designed and fabricated by Kotura, the 12-channel mux and demux chips directly couple light from laser arrays and detectors into a single fiber, simplifying the packaging and eliminating the costly need for dozens of lens, isolators, laser monitors and thermo-electric coolers (TECs), says the firm.

“Kotura has designed a large variety of WDM chips with small footprint, low cross-talk and low PDL [polarization dependent loss],” says chief technology officer Mehdi Asghari. “We have successfully fabricated designs from 4 to 40 channels, supporting wavelengths from 1200 to 1600nm and channel spacings from 20nm to 100GHz,” he adds. “The ATP-CyOptics chips contain hybridization features for the laser arrays, a Gaussian filter on the laser side, and a flat-top filter on the detector side.”

“While much of the industry is developing 40 and 100Gb/s Ethernet solutions, the next major step will be 500Gb/s and 1 Terabit,” says VP of marketing Arlon Martin. “Server blades with multi-core CPUs and 10Gb/s I/O ports are becoming more common, accelerating the need for higher speeds in the core of the data center.”

An ISO 9001:2000 certified company, Kotura is an active participant in the IEEE 802.3ba 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s Ethernet Task Force, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) and the Silicon Photonics Alliance — the first formal Community of Interest with the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA).

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